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This is a Symphony

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What shall we do, when public art becomes so vulgarly Marketable,

 

So Progressive, so Modern, so Global?

 

Set it on fire, and in doing so, create the next avant-garde:

 

The flaming wicks of Molotov cocktails will be our paintbrushes,

 

Terrifying sirens and megaphones will be our orchestras, we’ll scribe

 

New howling forms of poetry with every strike of a baton while the

 

Popping report of riot gas canisters punctuate our stanzas.

 

This is a symphony. – Reagan Lodge

 

This is the point of no return – the cut – through which the before and after are forever incommensurable.

 

This is the return of beauty, the return of joy, the return of autonomia – the return of a freedom to create forms of existence that escape any attempts of capture.

 

The Revolution will be a Festival. Coming 2015.

Can’t Get There From Here (2010 Digital Remaster)



Genealogy of a Becoming-Revolutionary, One

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What happens when a pagan dies? He goes to heaven, silly.

Random entry-point I. The effect of words is not a matter of belief, let alone truth, but obedience and conformity – most of which is unconscious: “Language’s primary function is not to communicate or inform but to issue orders;” “Speech acts don’t establish, share, or communicate a truth-relation to the world, but establish or transform the sense of what can or must be said about the world.”[1]

A. Asking whether or not the revolution can succeed is irrelevant to the man in revolt. This is because the question itself is only made sensible – or given sense – in the deeply non-critical, soft, and gooey center of the modern order of knowledge.

i. Order of knowledge: can one even say order, now that we make the critical distinction between Logos (and its state-sponsored thought) and nomos (and its Outsider, rebel, Übermensch thought) – the State/Academy/bourgeois media and a total, brazen, and hostile disregard for what makes the form of life/manner of being human that they peddle have any sense-value?

ii. Nonetheless, if one must speak, one must do so within a rule-based assemblage with distinct possibilities and parameters. Unless, of course, one desires to be misunderstood …

a. If even the perfectly academically disciplined man is made incomprehensible and thus irrelevant to the average working man, what can be expected from an encounter between the average and the Übermensch? How many levels of incomprehension can one create in, say, 5 minutes?

1. Purpose of language?

2. Purpose of State

3. Purpose of police

4. Purpose of capitalism

5. Purpose of discipline (in children, but also as a metaphor)

6. Purpose of metaphor

b. Ethnographic study is the saving grace of anthropology. Whereas the latter is a political institution designed to discipline minds and behavioral potentialities in the name of bourgeois modernity and the dominant contemporary conceptions of being human, the former has the capacity to be transvaluational of its institutional homeland. The student or master casts himself out – into a wild, an outland – to live amongst the savage, barbarian, and the minority – those whose stake in modernity is still up for grabs, and are thus capable of identifying the cracks, fissures, and weaknesses in what often appears to be a bourgeois liberalizing monolith.

1. Far too often, though, the ethnographer is too completely armed with a bourgeois conceptual apparatus to appreciate the minor barbarian on its own terms – to create a barbarian relationship with the barbarian: to become-barbarian! – and to be able to grasp the magnitude of the outsider’s critique. Some institutions are beyond reproach, after all. Being properly immured against following any such barbarian escape route, the ethnographer instead critiques the barbarian for failing to conform to the universalizing narratives of bourgeois humanness (identity, gender, race, kinship, economy, rationality, etc.).

2. Certainly, the anthropologically minded ethnographer can be open to the critiques of the minority, so long as these do not delegitimize the operative bourgeois conceptual apparatus: the minor economy can be understood in relation to liberal economics, just as gender roles, social aggregations, and images of thought can be shown to possess a particular disposition toward or away from gender, racethnicity, and rationality. The barbarian’s right to affirm its own form of life, though, is another matter.

3. Anthropology loves the savage, in other words, as long as he is a good anthropological subject. Likewise ethnographers. Proper disciplining of the ethnographic mind is the only thing that guarantees anthropology a future, as it ensures that (enough) ethnographers will preserve their allegiance to the bourgeois form of life and return from the outland with a lovely and exciting narrative of savagery that justifies, above all, the material and conceptual bases of modern lifeways. In other words, today’s ethnographers must become tomorrow’s anthropologists.

4. But what happens when an ethnographer refuses the right to become-anthropologist? What happens when an ethnographer refuses to accept anthropology’s orthodoxy? What happens when the ethnographer knows the history of anthropological ideas, but also knows that they have no use-value whatsoever? What happens to this heretical malcontent, too critical for his own good – too quick to dismantle the good sense that buttresses every argument for playing ball?

5. This derelict becomes barbarian. He no longer has a stake – nothing to defend, nothing to demand – in anthropology.

B. Orthodoxy is the only sovereign in the Academy, and it is the same orthodoxy that can be found in every nook and cranny of American life: from the far Left to the extreme Right, in every captured mind and overcoded life in-between. For what can be studied and thought on campus mirrors what can be publicly and safely discussed socially.

i. Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal make sense as long as they protest about social justice and the hierarchization of the racial human (i.e., as long as they protest racism but celebrate – nay, create! –  their legitimate claims to humanity in terms viable to the bourgeois form of life: ALWAYS A MOB, NEVER A PACK – always in numbers great enough to make altruism universally codifiable so as to increase policability, profitability, and market stability – race will do then!

ii. The gnawa narrative: former slaves seeking to maintain their own authenticity in the tourist bazaars of Marrakech – Good! GREAT! That sells. Likewise, notable non-Western (the conservative in us snickers at such an idea, while the derelict remembers how much non-Western space exists in his own modest household) musicians that must face audience scorn in Los Angeles for straying too far from a set of sounds deemed authentic by the bourgeois other face a form of discipline unknowable beyond America. RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE: Authenticity as order-word. Revolution as order-word. What does it take for either word to make sense? How many assumptions of the relationship between mind and body/conception and world? What is the purpose of language? Can language’s purpose in a bourgeois world be subverted? What assumptions would be its being-subverted possible?

iii. But what about gnawa as nomadic former slaves whose local particularity is understood in terms inseparable from the destructive forces of the arabization of North Africa? What happens to peoples/packs/bands/nomads when the State imposes a universalizing narrative on men and women in order to ORDER them? Are they to become-wage-slave and policable citizen – like children in a daycare, being led from place to place in a silent orderly line (making order sensible to a 3-year old so as to begin guiding all of his or her potential toward a life-as-political-subject [subjectification: one of the most brutal concepts ever devised - if you love the State]) – animated only by the needs of the State, thereby giving up their own micro-politics (its all politics, after all) for the sake of a general estimate that allows them safe passage into the world of truth, morality, racethnicity, etc. (see below) … Or, do they forgo their rightful place in the multicultural Logocentric pantheon – always safe, cozy, and properly dialectical: oh how lovely is the world when you have someone to blame … and remain incomprehensible?

iv. The National: soundtrack to Obama’s America – but also enjoyed by raptorous Übermenschen who run in “new barbarian” circles. Sorry boys, the author has no control … what are signs and signifiers to men without need of morality? … Content and expression assume an almost limitless amount of affect, assuming one has the (instinctual) capacity for such a thing  … if you only wanted one use-value, you shouldn’t have gotten capitalism involved.

v. War machines are only functional. They work or they don’t – they bust through roadblocks, or they don’t; and when they don’t, one abandons them for another. (A sword is a tool. When it is dull, it is sharpened. When it cannot be sharpened, another is procured.)

a. This orthodoxy makes itself known both conceptually and topically. Conceptually, continuity and stability reign, as a common language and uniformity of critique must be sustained, as the authority of the Academy and its ability to represent the interests of liberal modernity must not be undermined. Thus who and what can be studied – blacks, Latinos, whites, women, men, transsexuals, homosexuals, heterosexuals, asexuals, psychopaths, sociopaths, orthopaths, immigrants, nationals, transnationals, elite, bourgeois, proletariat – already and always conforms to already and always dominant categories and conceptual schemas – racethnicity, gender, sexuality, psychology, and political ecomony – of liberal bourgeois modernity.

b. So, the question is perhaps not so much who and what can be studied, but who and what can be studied in such a way that justifies and solidifies the universalizing tendencies of bourgeois man. Ultimately this reduces inquiry – indeed, what is possible to know, think, feel, and do – to a series of tropes – race, class, gender – that not only conform to the needs of bourgeois gentility and market activity but also set the parameters of being human. When this tendency is observed politically it reduces all differences to a search for and rightful demand of Agency (!).

c. Minorities of every shape, color, and creed all seek their rightful place at the majority’s table. Academically this tendency functions similarly, especially as the practitioners are slightly more aware than the laity of how their conformity to the concepts and tropes ensures their place at the table. After all, there is always room for racial, ethnic, gendered – and otherwise liberally identified – humans at the table – those who understand themselves precisely in the terms given them by the bourgeois form of life – but … no room for nomads and barbarians.

Sandia


[1] Eugene Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury) 2013.


There’s a Storm Coming

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“You must know that blood has no value or splendor unless it has been freed from the prison of the arteries by iron or fire.” – F.T. Marinetti[1]

 

In the early days of July 1923, a heroic and blasphemous storm blew across the Carso plain and down into the Po river valley. Its high winds and electrified clouds created an atmosphere that transfixed those who scrambled for the safety of porticoes, sensing that this storm would put to a test all that had survived such storms in the past. Indeed, by the time it reached the flag-ringed buildings of Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro the great storm seemed to laugh at the memory of the structures that fell in its wake. And in that great and hallowed piazza, Giuseppe Prezzolini cowered away from the window, intent to finish the work that taxed his overwrought senses.

 

Prezzolini, the fine journalist and literary critic, was deep in rumination about perspective. How, he wondered, could those who sought to revolutionize the world champion something as amorphous and changing as perspective? How could revolt, of all things, proceed without the order and precision of truth and objectivity? How could the pathetic moans of an amateurish whore be confused with an ecstatic symphony of pleasure; or worse, how could the exalted battle cries of the world’s new masters be merely the cacophonous baying of a frightened herd of sheep? With this problem in mind, he tapped out his work, “Fascism and Futurism,” and thereby gave his readers a new perspective on the storm blowing through his proud and sanctified abode.

 

…  (The final paper will be published at Counter-Currents, but not before another teaser and more liberated music can be found here.)

Kangding Ray’s Antar (Original Mix)

 

[1] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Let’s Murder the Moonlight,” in Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 55.


Gasoline is Divine

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“Don’t worry about creating some massive political movement or recruiting thousands or millions of people. Don’t worry about changing the State. Barbarians don’t worry about changing the State. That’s for men of the State — who believe in and belong to the State.” – Jack Donovan[1]

Counter-Currents has published a new paper, “Life is Always Right: Futurism and Man in Revolt.” I wrote it while in the process of editing my first book for Arktos Media. Silence can be a good thing, for in my case it usually means that a ghastly derelict soup is heating to a boil. This time it is the lovely pairing of Deleuzo-Nietzschean affirmative political philosophy with the derelicts of the early-20th C avant-garde, the Futurists.

The story of the Futurists is parallel to those of the arditi and other heroic fighting and thinking men; and like the arditi, Futurism weaves its way into and out of Fascism on a path littered with mutual admiration, incomprehension, revolution, and finally, counter-reformation.

The Futurists were simply too radical and too revolutionary to play a major role in the Fascist State. But, States being what they are, this is understandable. We don’t blame the State – right Mr. Donovan? – we just fight it. And while we continue to admire, use, and become what Fascism borrowed from both the arditi and the Futurists – the squadrismo, love of danger, and spirit of transvaluation – we will also critique its apotheosis of the liberal State in all of its subjectifying and capturing power.

Having known about Futurism for as long as I’ve known about Fascism, it never appealed to my overly-rationalized/over-coded sensibilities. I had found a home, as it was, with Fascism and forms of contemporary political action (like the Ultras) that stemmed from squadrismo. After all, I had come to Fascism via what I assumed was the Far Left of French post-structuralism. Little did I know how much Far Left and Far Right have in common. And little did I know how little either of them has to do with radical thought and revolution against being-bourgeois.

My return to Deleuze saved my life, so to speak, by allowing me to radicalize my understanding/conceptual apparatus in such a drastic way that I now think about human organization and conglomeration in terms far removed from liberal tradition and theory. I suppose the trajectory – Poststructuralism – Fascism – Nietzsche – Deleuze – Futurism – makes perfect sense from the standpoint of the teleology that today affords. And yet, as is life (+1+1+1+1 …) if not for a reader-cum-confidant, Reagan Lodge, I might never have re-connected with something I’d once been forced to know by academic circumstance. While I have several fascisti and a few barbarians in my conspiratorial circle, I have only one Futurist, and Mr. Lodge is also quite ardito, so he has properly embraced his potential.

Just as Mr. Lodge was regaling a beautiful few of us with some futurista-ardito act of badassery, another artist a continent away, Kangding Ray, was releasing his latest masterwork, Solens Arc. A few listens in, I hurriedly scribbled a few questions:

Does sound have a morality?

Is there a morality of sound?

How does mundane politics influence those who say yes?

How do visual cues inform how we understand sound?

Does bourgeois music promote a certain morality?

Is it possible to create anti-bourgeois music? What would it sound like?

I knew that Mr. Ray – even by Raster-Noton’s incredibly high and radical standards – was on to something new, radical, and futuristic. It cleaned out the cobwebbed putrid old junk that often masquerades as indispensable relics from a world-weary utopia. It made everything seem old, quaint, and reactionary by comparison. It became the soundtrack to my furiously written paper on Futurism. Thus I am offering it here for those who wish to hear the smells and colors of Futurist revolution.

But a particular review of Mr. Ray’s Solens Arc also prompted a question of its own in my notebook:

“How does one strip away the radical potential of a thought, an idea, a concept, a moment of creation, or a sensation of dereliction?”

The answer simplified is to search for its meaning, which will immediately filter it through the vast language-based cogito that modernity has provided so as to create of each of us a common commodity, political subject, and capitalist consumer. The answer as it pertains to Kangding Ray lies somewhere between the sound/music of Solens Arc, the teleological “clear progression” with a beginning and end that a kindly reviewer heard, and the words that Mr. Ray himself spoke about Solens Arc:

“A stone thrown, just to watch it fly. A projectile launched for the sole purpose of drawing a ballistic trajectory in the sky. The Solens arc is what remains after the subtraction of the goal; a simple parabolic curve defined by gravity, impulse and starting angle. No target to hit, no catharsis to wait for, just the beauty of the flight.”

Is this not the image of nomadic thought?

Mr. Ray made a soundtrack for radical Futurist readers of Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson and the unnamed reviewer heard an album made for patriotic, God fearing, philistines. But the lesson is clear in any case:

While we chafe at the striation of the smooth space of the Outlands – inhospitable mountains turned into productive shopping malls, we do the very same to thought. We carry into any outlands the baggage that only allows for more shopping malls, for more of what we already know.

Meanwhile, back on Mr. Lodge’s continent, the Guggenheim Museum opened a special exhibit of Futurist art that will run until September 2014. Its guidebook alone is a magnum opus of dereliction against a flaccid life. So, it seems Futurism is in the air, awaiting new assemblages and conjunctions of radical potential.

Why now? I cannot say, except that Futurism, as I told my Guattari Dave Stimpson, is like Deleuze in a mosh pit with Homeric heroes at a Squarepusher concert. It is and can only be untimely, pricking the ears of only a few madmen and madwomen.

Kangding Ray, Solens Arc (Raster-Noton, 2014)

Serendipity March

The River

Evento

The River (Reprise)

Blank Empire

L’envol

Amber Decay

Apogee

History of Obscurity

Crystal

Transitional Ballistics

Son

 

[1] Jack Donovan, “The New Barbarians,” from A Sky Without Eagles, 2014.


The Price of Heroes

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For Homer, Athena is the coming together of every force necessary for heroic action to conquer the moment at hand. She is an ethical approach to life, one unburdened by a necessarily moralistic conformity to Form and Tradition. She is life in all of its glorious natural perfection, in direct opposition to the universal law of God that seeks its servitude. She is creative, caring little for the trivialities of a meaningful existence. She is action, pure and affirmative – the inspiration to push a human body to the limits of its possibilities. She is force without reserve – instincts in all of their aggression, precision, and perfection – leading the charge on Troy, Ithaca, Crete, and the Underworld.

For Plato, she is instead a closed window keeping at bay the tempests of life. She is the diminution of heroism, instead the patron of the patient and mild; and even, if our eyes do not deceive, the bureaucrat! She is the guardian of morality, Form, and Tradition: the keeper of Truth and proper erudition: patron to the man of the State – a lion reduced to raging at tics and flies, filled to the brim with guilt, ressentiment, and the power of judgment – concerned not with the active potential of force but with separating what it can do from what is best for the herd. She is a reactionary, sitting on a wall in night patrol, guarding the State, work, authority, and order from the freedoms of the barbarians.

For Lee Hall, Athena is a reaction to the oppressive nature of Classical gender relations. She is a forlorn woman forced to immolate her seductive and reproductive capabilities so as not to offend her weaker and tyrannical male counterparts. She is a scorned lover, anxious to spite each and all that so mistreat women. She is a woman who knows better than to adventure with heroes and fighting men, seeking instead the safety and security offered by the women of the State and marketplace. She is a woman who gladly forgoes the danger of high places, for she has learned that danger no longer offers opportunities to overcome reactive Platonic forces but instead that it merely tempts fate.

For Martin Bernal, Athena is an Afrocentric princess fighting against racist epistemologies. She is revenge against one unique expression of racism, and the affirmation of another. She is a Platonic bulwark against injustice and God’s Law. In this endeavor she is given back to the barbarians, as it is, but only insofar as this gift aspires to ensure the capture, or becoming-bourgeois, of the once-furious horde.

From Homer to Hall and Bernal we see that Athena has undertaken quite a journey. She has left behind the heroes and warriors for bourgeois politics and institutions. But our critique falters if it holds these mediocre bourgeois thinkers responsible for Athena’s descent – even if we all get the Athena we deserve. Instead, the break on Athena’s power must be located at the tip of Plato’s fragile pallid fingers; for it is Plato who separates Athena from what she can do, creating of her a policeman in the service of merchants, politicians, the State, and the iron rule of God. Gone are the irrational glories of Perseus, Achilles, Odysseus, and Ajax – cast adrift with wills and weapons to do what mortals had never done before – and the will to perfection in danger. Instead she finds herself toiling in dank offices, filing the paperwork on the various criminals who dare to break with morality, Form, and Truth.

Indeed, it is Plato’s Athena who equates virtue with wisdom, and who understands that these can only be found in the company of slavish priestly men. But the truth of Plato is not found in what he says, but in what “what he says” does; and what he says creates a bourgeois man of anyone who longs to hear truth in his words. Better yet, just as Athena thrilled in unleashing the heroic in mortal men, Plato thrills in unleashing the bourgeois, knowing full well that his republic is safer without warriors and barbarians at its gates. He thus captures their war machines, allowing them ample space to learn a trade that is well suited for a careful life of leisure. And just as these men of the steppes had to be corralled and broken in order to become useful to the republic, so to did Athena have to become meaningful to a herd in order to become useful to bourgeois men.

This is the price of heroes.

Swan Swan H


Reivers and Bushwhackers, We Salute You

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There are those who see subjectification as the impossibility of revolt, and others who see it as the creation of a warfront on every single aspect of life. Some seek shelter in semiocratic slavery; others, however, go to war.


Recently Published: Global Rome

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Indiana University Press has just published Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City, which contains an essay on Ultras and fandom. “Football, Romanità, and the Search for Stasis,” gives a sense of how affective and active is the fascist narrative of Romanità in the lives of certain Romans. Although it was challenging to write about fans and Ultras of both AS Roma and SS Lazio, the essay came together nicely, and allowed me to discuss Romanità, violence, and the affirmation of local particularity with a wider audience than either Curva Sud Roma or Appalachian subversives often permit.

In keeping with the theme of the larger anthropological collection, I addressed the issue of “demographic change” in Rome, but did so only from the perspective of those who present themselves as native or true Romans. There was no malicious intent in doing so (in other words, I had no racial or reactionary agenda), unless one considers the European Union, the liberal/neo-liberal Italian State, political democracy, or multiculturalism as either natural, neutral, or positive actors in the lives of Romans. Instead, each of these bourgeois phenomena is presented as an imposition that creates specific opportunities for the exploitation of human energy (in narrative or bodily form) and capital (in renter or debtor form) – impositions that are fought by certain Romans on a daily basis.

As I begin …

“Rome is a city whose past is rich in images of warfare, conquest, and glory. From Virgil’s proclamation that the Romans were a people predetermined to rule the world, to Mussolini’s desire to reestablish Roman control of the Mediterranean, the idea that Rome and glory are interrelated has a long history. In contemporary Rome, it is an idea that has been adopted by the fans of the city’s football teams. As Associazione Sportiva Roma (AS Roma) and Società Sportiva Lazio (SS Lazio) search for wins in Italian and European football, both teams’ fans use a set of symbols culled from classical and fascist Rome designed to connect victory on the field, and often in the streets, with the idealized supremacy of Roman culture. However, these symbols are often at-odds with the demographic realities of contemporary Rome. While the city is moving toward the multiculturalism found in other world capitals, many of its football fans embrace Romanità, a deep affection for Rome and things Roman, in an effort to identify with a primordial Rome that is impervious to contemporary political and social trends. This paper explains how football keeps alive a sense of Romanness that originated with the fascist regime, while also explaining the affinities and contrasts between the fans of AS Roma and SS Lazio.”

Football fandom is merely a window into the use of violence, narratives of extreme particularity, and the unique assemblages that can be created with Rome’s warring and glorious past, and how these act as a break on the becoming-bourgeois of the Eternal City. Fandom, then, is properly acted as a localized war against homogenization and pacification, for there is no doubt that Italy’s attempts to rid football of its most extreme fans is little more than a highly visible aspect of the bourgeois war against violence and particularity wherever they are found.


Southern Appalachia: Marx’s Hillbilly Hell

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Yesterday I woke up with a recollection at least 10 years old. Time-scaling the processes of thinking gives lie to the image of thought as the instantaneous interplay of representations between corporeal assemblage and mental cognition – some thoughts take 10 years and exhaust the world’s terrains to make themselves known! Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, I woke up thinking, is as hysterical as a marketing department in its disappointment by the peasantry’s inability to be codified and utilized as a class. 

What freaked him out is that they are outside! that they cannot be captured by the bourgeois representational scheme of which his State-sponsored historico-economically determined man is so obviously a part. These peasants, he complained, are too isolated and provincial to be organized, and in order to be amalgamated as a class, the peasants would first have to be indoctrinated with an economic ideology that would homogenize and synchronize their myriad different experiences of the world and life and thereby allow their becoming-represented in the bourgeois economicization of man. In other words, not only the bourgeoisie but also Marx had to capture the peasantry in order to make it a functional component of the bourgeois form of life. 

Something is always left outside, though: this I realized later in the day, as I explored Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. Contrary to Marx, Kephart takes a more sympathetic view of peasant life ways. The mountain men and women are extremely isolated, he explains, but instead of this being a burden – something akin to living within the continental domain of the American Dream but having no roads to deliver such promises of freedom – the mountaineers live beyond the scope of sovereignty.

They live, he says, free – free to live, love, suffer, exalt, and design in their own image and to their own ends. They have no national, race, class, or gender consciousness, no memory of ever having been herded together, no nothing that would allow their bodily energies to be homogenized and exploited for the benefit of a paymaster or leisure coordinator. 
Kephart glorifies what Marx lamented: that some men live free; that the State, it’s laws, and it’s economic needs have limits; and that for the free man, the State is an imposition that must be fought off at every point of contact – not the least of which is epistemic. 

Kephart contra Marx becomes a theoretician of the relationship between body, instinct, and the organizational powers of words, concepts, and the juridical apparatuses of truth and morality. For what Kephart recognizes in mountaineer independence is the lack of sovereign juridical power on the one hand, and that lack being the direct result of the invisibility of modern representational identitiary schemas on the other. As he says, the mountaineers ask for no criterion of judgement, but instead give and take “to each his own,” in the old Roman sense of the phrase. 

It is as if the mountaineers have willfully given up their rightful opportunity to become bourgeois by rejecting the shepherding offered by modern identiary technologies. For it is firstly through having an identity – or, a State-sponsored sense-making representational tag – that revolutionary and nomadic potentials are negated; and it is instead non-identity – by constantly betraying and subverting the predicates yoked on us – that assembles the line of flight beyond being-bourgeois. 

Perhaps Kephart’s lesson is learned elsewhere, however. Perhaps instead he demonstrates that the lack of sovereignty over the mountaineers results from the lack of corresponding bourgeois spaces and social organizations. As well-traveled as he was, Nietzsche understood that ideas, values, and evaluations have a specific time and place: what makes sense of life in the striated and pacified valley has little value on the dangerously smooth mountaintop. Likewise the types of men who would find something useful and valuable in these sense-making evaluations would vary by time and place. 

Kephart’s southern highlanders, in other words, are perhaps lacking in the instincts that easily yoke the burdens, identities, and rights of slaves. And just as wolves care little about the organizational and structural apparatuses of the bison herd – which no doubt attempt to negate the power and beauty of becoming-wolf – the mountaineers take care to avoid being negated by the technologies and techniques that maintain and perfect the bourgeois herd. 

In either case, Kephart demonstrates that the types of men who would reject being yoked to diminishing and negating identiary technologies of capture and enslavement are also the types who would have little to do with bourgeois assemblages and life ways. Never ones for half-measures, the highlanders run blockades against the State’s revenuers, kill its conscription officers, and desert from its wars. 

When asked about the legacy of such behaviors and displays of aggression against the State, one of Kephart’s Deep Creek confidants acted nonplused. “There ain’t a man who lives here,” he responded,”that would bow down to a man who doesn’t live here just on account of some laws and good feeling. I reckon that takes a shame we don’t well enough know.”
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Becoming-Autonomy

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Destroying the old world through revolutionary transgression is often presented in these pages as if it is less an action of gesture than one of language. This, of course, is incorrect, as gesture and language cannot be compartmentalized as homogenous zones of the event. Discourse and action/narrative and behavior are coterminous.

If it appears otherwise according to the dominant regime of sense-ory representation and signification it is because of the necessity of denying language’s coercive power – to say nothing of its creative power! And if it appears otherwise according to our analyses it is because of our necessary embracing of these powers of narrative.

Indeed the goal is to understand the event – and the affects of and in the event – as the nexus of gesture and language. Better yet, the goal is the CREATE events wherein the lines connecting gesture and language become superfluous because super-functional: instinct and action without the intermediaries of sign and meaning. 

Events of this kind would fit no prerequisite metaphysics in order to have value. They would lie beyond the sovereignty of all known languages – refusing the State-sponsored discourses that presuppose our forced tranquility, becoming instead unauthorized and illegitimate – an autonomous region free from political-cultural subjects but full of active relentless secessions. 

These events would effectuate secessions from sociality – from the profitable and homogenizing reductions that allow the good to be easily governed and the bad to be gloriously eliminated – and autonomies from citizenship – from the economic and juridical protection from predation and marginality – that would themselves create zones of freedom unbearable for the types of men that crave the stabilizing effects of laws, truths, meanings, and the representational predicates that make possible the capitalist and Statist exploitation of human energy – slavish in the case of the former, violent in the case of the latter. 

Political-cultural subjectivation demands the affirmation of the very subjectivities that create of us racialized, gendered, bourgeoised I men, women, and children; employable, comprehensible, loyal, and docile.

The events we would create are the perpetual, violent, and uncompromising rejection and betrayal of subjectivation and all that is assigned and promised us as sensible bourgeois subjects. 

These would be events of secession: a line of flight neither to a new political-cultural alterity nor to a new form of political organization but instead to a radically new plane of consistency – to a new singularity and disaggregation of life’s potentials for assemblage and creation. 

This line of flight would be a movement of internal desertion, of an irreducibility to the bourgeois man and his heaven, of a total absence from State-Capital: indifferent to its values, ignorant of its provocations, and unresponsive to its stimuli. 

Autonomy! Desertion! Deserting family; deserting school; deserting the office, the army, the duty, the responsibility, the debt; deserting men, women, and citizen; deserting everything that holds us entrapped, enslaved, and entranced. 


Bodyhammer: Derelict Weapons and Tactics

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Sarin’s Bodyhammer was sent to me by a friend at Forza Nuova, not long after I began hanging around their Rome headquarters on Piazza Vescovio. This was back in 2007, and I’ve not since found anything online that gives such practical and useful pointers for engaging the police and other forms of organized peacekeeping; and believe me I’ve searched.

 

A few changes of computer, thanks to the poor quality of various Microsoft operating systems, left me without Bodyhammer for several years. I’d remember it and give a quick search or two before returning to other matters, never finding another copy. But the good people at Forza Nuova made other similar assemblages with foreign agents living in Rome, one of which is a Greek radical who shared time with me amongst the fascists, Ultras, anarchists, and autonomists in the Eternal City.

 

He sent me a nice packet of materials pertaining to the ongoing Athens riots, including the Sarin pamphlet. Knowing that I am not content to be a bourgeois educator, he also asked that I help establish a new portal for disseminating radical thought, which I am doing with a group of post-liberal men and women around the world. That site is derelictspace.com: a zone free from the organizing, subjectifying, representing, and synchronizing effects of State capture and control. Today it provides a daily dose of radical dereliction; tomorrow it might affect a becoming-revolutionary.

 

BODYHAMMER Use it as you will, but will to use it.


Become the Last Man’s Reckoning

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BIFTF isn’t a State and it’s not your typical insurgency; it’s much more interesting than that – it is a freewheeling bazaar of violence. It is a collective action that only exists when active. BIFTF is a becoming, with nothing to command its allegiance beyond the moment of its own violence on its own behalf.

BIFTF isn’t trying to build a State. It’s not a government. It’s a bazaar in an autonomous zone. It operates outside of the global system.  It doesn’t want to be a State: a State would make it answerable and vulnerable to other States – a State would make it less a bazaar of violence than a bazaar of peaceful consumption.

A State would make it the range of domesticated herd animals.

The violence bazaar was built for one purpose:  perpetual expansion of predatory autonomy and continuous warfare against every passive roadblock and cowardly checkpoint. Thus, BIFTF offers only minimalist, decentralized governance.

Men who need governance need a State, a God, or other such tyranny.

The strategies and tactics BIFTF uses are open sourced. BIFTF is a verb – a doing, an action: to fight is what it does, to advance nothing beyond the State: the end of History, the retreat from domestication. Any group or individual can BIFTF, as long as they want freedom more than civilization. Weapons, ideas, and other technologies needed for war are developed, shared between participants and the pace of development based on previous examples is very quick: BIFTF is now.

There is only now. There is only this instant. This instant just passed – and you are still in a herd: an excellent and happily shepherded sheep, but still a sheep.

The top of the class is still a domesticated slave.

Stealing money from churches and corporations is highly encouraged.

Making money is for domesticated slaves.

Making money is the only reason the State still exists. It is a frightened child clutching to its chest a credit card that alone can ward off danger and hunger. It is you stuck in traffic on a Monday morning, bringing nothing but misery to life, and with so many options that elude you – so many becomings-predator that you ignore. It is the “prison and mold” that keeps you obedient to an authority working to ensure that you are only just weary enough of life to keep from spilling your own entrails in a cubicle.

It is domestication as freedom: the barest life, the will to perpetuate … what?

BIFTF is not you. BIFTF is not a State. BIFTF is not why. BIFTF is DO.

BIFTF encourages mercenary action, provided that payment for said action can be exploded in a shopping mall. BIFTF is thinning the herd. Thinning the herd is fun.

All of these attributes make BIFTF hard to fight and a joy to become. Become the only thing you aren’t allowed to become by your overseers. Become the only thing they fear. Become BIFTF. Become the Last Man’s reckoning.

Thinners Of The Herd

Reterritorialized from John Robb


We Can’t Turn Back

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“We will always find ourselves reterritorialized again.” The question is, the only question is, the type of assemblage that will be giving form to our content. Will it be one created to enhance reactionary forces and the negation of all but the most orthodox and obedient possibilities? Or will it be one that breaks loose all that kept us docile for so long? Will it reaffirm what the State gave us as palliative? Or will it redirect the roads, canals, and bridges that the State used to infect us with its sovereignty?

Melville wanted to break through, he really did. He understood how subjectivity is the expression of a content formed by subjectification: that the things we feel, think, and act are always already preconditioned by some form of sociality. If that form is a capitalist State, well then, the body becomes a tool of the State. If instead it is a radical nomadic terror cell, well, you get the picture.

And so we love Melville for getting that far. His problem, though, was in being unwilling to go further. “Push against the wall and break through,” he said, “that is enough!” Lovely, but not enough.

DH Lawrence spoke about Melville’s breaking through. “Melville,” he said, “knows how to break through, to cross the horizon. But having done so, he fears nothing more than the possibility of a return to savagery (such a thing was still believable then), and thus always maintained nostalgia for the home country. All that he ran away from, then, he carried along on his back, becoming-jackass for sovereignty and a comfortable bed; carrying them as far away as a man could flee. Melville was, at the core,” he concluded, “a mystic and an idealist. And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine. I say, let the old guns rot. Get new ones, and shoot straight.”

Reterritorialized from A Thousand Plateaus, 188-189


The Derelict Agōgē

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Within five minutes of sending Counter-Currents an essay on the intellectualization and counter-socialization of a young mind, what the bourgeois world calls “homeschooling,” I was being beaten with two plastic hockey sticks. My son might not know it exactly, but his hyper-violence is an active and formidable break on the becoming-bourgeois demanded of him by every word, image, sound, texture, smell, and taste created and transmitted by the State and its economy.

What we do at home is to create a space in which these transmissions have no power. “There are no priests here,” I said to him this morning, “because there are no slaves here.” There is no overcode that inscribes anything slavish; there is nothing but a form of life made possible by fighting, defiance, thinking supra-critically, and affirming our own circumstances with zero negative input from beyond our home-derelict space.

The content of our quotidian existence comes from several forces: music and words far from the bourgeois norm; techniques and forms of precision associated with weaponry; martial arts; dance; and unbridled ferocious action.

There are toys: pistols, assault rifles, hunting rifles, bows, crossbows, daggers, knives, swords, bow staffs, Monster Trucks, pirates, nomadic horseback warriors, Romans (who now serve as the State that is being reduced to ashes), army dudes (who fight for no flag), dinosaurs, and sharks.

This morning, we discussed types of men. In light of the Fight Club fiasco – in my son’s world all men are muscular badasses who often have shaved heads and fight with aplomb. They wear cool clothes and kickass sunglasses. What they don’t tend to do is smoke cigarettes; so in the end, that is the form of dereliction he associated with Tyler Durden. (Dereliction is always contextual – depending on the very particular assemblage at hand.)

So this morning, the new playmobil barbarian that we added to our pack of State-fighting outlaw badasses suddenly seemed out of place. Not that things have proper places in a world being torn asunder, but this guy … had no weapon. Leave it to playmobil to understand: they give so many great weapons to their figures, yet this one came out of the box seemingly with only his hands to protect himself: no crossbow, no bow, no melee weapon.

And that’s when I realized: this guy is a priest! A goddamn shaman sent to capture and control our pack of outlaw badasses: a Celtic fighter, a Cossack horseman, a Germanic warrior, and a wolf. And now some guy who will protect himself and exert control over the pack with ressentiment and a set of demands that life have more beauty than is apparent to the man who fights to be free of just such sentiments.

So over breakfast we talked about human types, leadership and what specific types of men demand from those who lead and follow, and about the tools of priestly men versus those of nomadic fighting men. I am teaching him about debt and how it is used concurrently by priests, revenuers, and profiteers to capture men like Dark Horse – our playmobil Cossack – and men like us.

His relationship to knowledge will never be priestly. He won’t be passive, not my son, if nothing else.

He’s not being created to get a good job. He’s not being fed to a machine that will make him a docile, comfortable, and compliant citizen.

He wasn’t born for that. My wife didn’t carry him for that. We don’t put food in his mouth or clothes on his back for that. Why would we, as parents, want so little for our son?

My World


Defiance and The New Reaction

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When they said, “Rachel, one must be this or that,” she replied that she is neither, or both. When they said, “Patience, parties, movements, and a well-established hierarchy are necessary for our triumph,” she said, “We need instead riots, total war, and the destruction of the totems that have created your priestly relationship with life.” When they demanded orthodoxy, she said, “being ruled is being ruled, control is control.”

Thus I wrote in the foreword to The New Reaction, Rachel Haywire’s recently published collection of essays (Arktos, 2015). I only know Rachel from her words, and most thoroughly from the words in this book; but Rachel has been around the nomos for a long while, popping up in one unruly place after another to burn a bridge or two and then move on. As said some perp on Amazon, Haywire got in tight with some nazi dudes and then posted a bunch of porno on their sanctified website. Now, I have no care in the world to know if it is true, only to say I’d be disappointed to find that it is not.

What’s funny about the episode is that the slavish crusader who wrote the single-star review for The New Reaction used it as evidence that Rachel is … a racist? The fact that he said nothing about Futurism, drama, theatricality, radical autonomy, chaos, order, or orthodoxy tells me two things: 1. That he’s a clod that doesn’t have a proper relation to Rachel’s body of work and therefore has no business dismissing her book on a public site, and 2. That he didn’t read my foreword, which I can assure you, is worth whatever price the book demands, whether cosmic, physiological, or monetary.

I perked up on Rachel when she wrote a scathing exit letter, of sorts, that castigated men on the Right political fringe for being less manly than she is. This letter was passed around the various web-based revolutionary cadres, and the crazy hyper-masculine squadristi, who won’t lift a finger to actually change anything they complain about all day, were ready to assassinate the poor girl. So, I checked it out, and immediately became a fan. Rachel and I don’t share a vocabulary or even methodology – nor do I with Greg Johnson or Alain de Benoist for that matter, but we do share a common defiance in the face of slavishness. We share a desire to start a fight, because that fight just might be the fuse that ignites an overcoming so profound that we will be unable to turn back to the bridge we just crossed.

What did Tyler Durden say? “At least Rachel is trying to hit rock bottom.” Poor Tyler Durden. The true lesson of Fight Club isn’t that megalomania and mild tyranny is the risk run by anyone who escapes, but that men who become-fight club no longer have a need for Tyler Durden. Maybe that will be Rachel’s ultimate Zarathustran sacrifice as well. Followers demand something that only a slave could demand. As do leaders. Usually that something is docility.

This lesson escaped me when I was becoming-ultra at the price of becoming-academic. I couldn’t understand the Ultras’ brazen disregard and contempt for authority – especially because they were nominally fascists! At the time, though, I knew next to nothing about Futurism. I must have thought that arditi and Decima MAS were soldiers, lining up for reverie, tearfully saluting a flag, and taking orders. I found out later that the MAS took very few orders and hoisted their own flag above La Spezia, fighting on long after the pacification of Italy – not for a flag or an abstract grand narrative, but for themselves, for their brothers, for the thrill of battle. Less Fascists than men who fight, who embraced what war had created and unleashed in them – a defiance in the face of slavishness. For these men there was no turning back, no return to the normalcy of bourgeois life; war for them was not an abnormal intrusion into the peace and prosperity of their quotidian existence – the quiet after the storm – but was instead unhindered dancing in the storm itself, dodging the thunderbolts attracted by their bayonets and high leaps.

This affect is a style of life. Memento Audere Semper. Remember Always to Dare. It is why I write – at least as a goal. Write as a man at war, not as a priest in a tower. Write with a relationship to words that would make the boys in the MAS proud. Write like Marinetti with a dagger between my teeth and an uncorked whiskey bottle spilling from my whirling hand. But Zarathustran that I am, even if I reach the goal, I am soon ready to burn it and move on.

Complacency, what Z called, “bovine contentment,” is for priests and other Last Men. Let them have complacency. We have moonlight to murder and warring hygiene to offer the world. And we will know how few are with us when we see our old friends in retreat. Memento Audere Semper boys, for you are not who you were five minutes ago, and you never will be again!

Overcoming the last man starts at home and it starts right now.


Excerpt: Romanità as Counter-Modern Discourse

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             Having just stated that Romanità, and its uses by Evola and fascism, is a form political modernism, I must make clear why I continue to call it counter-modern. As I explained in the Introduction, fascism is a complex mixture of political modernism and counter-modern, or Counter-Enlightenment, philosophy. In other words, it seeks to actualize a way of living that is an aggrandizement of the radical edge of modernity, with its fetishes for change, movement, industrialization, and efficiency, while at the same time constructing a cultural core around a scathing critique of the intellectual bases of such social change, namely egalitarianism, marketization, and individualism. Romanità might be useful as a means of motivating the “actualization” of modern life, in the guise of political and social change, but in its championing of selected elements of Rome’s intellectual heritage, demonstrated above by Evola, it is essentially counter-modern.

            To take the matter further, Evola explained his use of Romanità in terms that countered the metaphors of collective human aggregates found not only in the origins of liberalism (the people, the nation) but in Hegel (the State). Instead of these concepts, which subsume the individual human will to a system that counter-balances the potential for individual greatness, Evola proposed the Roman and Nordic systems of Tradition. These, he felt, “do not recognize the voice of the leveled multitudes, but instead beat down and mock these idols of clay, these modern ideologies, and organize themselves on the … recognition of the irreducible differences among men, which define themselves in the natural and dynamic relation of their intensity.” The idealized elements of Roman character, then, are not attainable for the multitude. As we have seen, the Ultras conceive of themselves in the same terms, as an elite element that is separated from the bourgeois masses by their own devotion to Evola’s ideals.

            It was suggested in previous chapters that the Ultras’ mentalità, while containing aspects common to all Ultra groups in Italy, is better developed in AS Roma’s Ultras than in other curvas. It is, perhaps, no accident that the founders of Commando Ultra Curva Sud coined the phrase “mentalità Ultras” in 1977. This is because of the extraordinary depth of feeling they have for the city of Rome as well as the depth of historical and mythical narratives to be found in the city. Rome, its history and symbolic universe, confer upon Ultra thought and action a sense of “the eternal” or extreme importance.

            In 2004 Vincenzo Patanè Garsia interviewed Etore, one of the leaders of AS Roma Ultras. He spoke of AS Roma’s Ultras as “rappresentati di Roma città, e di tutto ciò che vi sta dietro … millenni di Storia e di cultura” (representatives of the city and all which that entails … millennia of history and culture). He continued to explain the pride and responsibility this conferred on the Ultras. “Come eredi di un Impero, come figli della Lupa, come gente Romana, fieri e orgogliosi andiamo in giro […] a sostenere i colori della nostra squadra e sopratutto della nostra città, la più bella del mondo” (like heirs of an emperor, or children of the Lupa [Capitolina], or the Roman people fierce and proud, we go on tour to support the colors of our team, but above all the colors of our city – the most beautiful in the world).

            While I was unable to interview Etore for this project I met others who know him well. One of these was Federico, founding member of Antichi Valori, and former member of AS Roma Ultras. He described Etore as a “bravo ragazzo,” (good guy, one of us) one of those always present and one who never turned his back to the enemy. I asked about his statement, quoted by Garsia, hoping to understand the rarity of his love of Rome. Federico shrugged his shoulders and told me, “we all feel this way – it is normal – if someone is this way they are an Ultra.” Sensing my next question he interrupted, “even if one does not go to the stadium.” In other words, not only is Etore’s feeling for Rome and what it means to be Roman not unique, but it is enough to agree with him in order to be considered an Ultra by those who see themselves as the “keepers of the faith,” the most proud and fierce of the Ultras. Federico’s analysis points to an interesting question. If one may be an Ultra without going to a stadium, what is the purpose of the game of soccer within the Ultra phenomenon? And this raises the prior question of why soccer is important to the Ultras.

            Why a sport is popular in particular time and place is often impossible to answer. Soccer holds a special place in any debate on the subject, as the United States, the tastemaker of the vast majority of popular culture in the West, is virtually bereft of passion for the game. Avoiding the psychological aspects of aesthetics or fandom, Markovits and Hellerman provide a social/material explanation for the popularity of sports in time and place. The main factor they identify is the presence of a sport for a long period, and crucially, at the moment of industrialization and the creation of mass society. Another factor is that a sport must be played, and not just watched, by a large percentage of the population. Finally, a sport should have enough media coverage that it becomes part of the “hegemonic sports culture” of the nation. It should be discussed long after the games are finished.

            The popularity of soccer tends to be a given in countries where it is hegemonic. That it is hegemonic is demonstrated by the connection of national character with the playing style found in each nation. For instance, the Brazilians connect “beauty and art” with the ways their professional and national teams play. Similarly, the Dutch want their teams to play beautifully rather than “doing anything” to win. The Italians, instead, seem to have always associated soccer with warfare. Simon Martin reports on the failure of Serie A to unite the peninsula, as Mussolini had intended, because of the extreme partisanship of local fans. Similarly John Foot summarizes the origins of Italian soccer by explaining the exacerbation of civic rivalries by the game.

            The Ultras and their understanding of soccer fit nicely within this understanding of soccer. The game was imported to Italy in the 1880s and became nationalized in the 1920s, meeting Markovits and Hellerman’s criteria. Likewise, Italians obsess over the game in midweek and it is no doubt the dominant sport in the country from a media point of view. And, every Ultra of AS Roma and every fan of soccer I met in Italy played the game in some form. Turning to the national character of the Italian game, the element of warfare and rivalry, as I have shown, is absolutely central to the Ultras as fans and as a unique social phenomenon.

            But if soccer is important and available enough to be the sport of choice for the Ultras, what purpose do they see it serving? Following Allen Guttman’s research of Ancient Roman spectators, the Ultras are perfectly consistent with the purpose of Roman sports for their most passionate fans: as an opportunity for partisanship. Guttman uses ancient sources to explain that Roman spectators were extremely partisan, to the point that partisanship seems to have been the point, or at least the draw, of spectating sports in the ancient city. Pliny the Younger, Guttman tells us, had difficulty understanding the passions of the masses for sports. If the masses had a genuine appreciation for the skills one needs to properly control a speeding chariot, perhaps he would have been more sympathetic to their passions. Instead, Pliny said, “it is the racing colors they really support and care about, and if the colors were to be exchanged in mid-course … they would transfer their favor and enthusiasm. Such is the popularity and importance of a worthless shirt.” Guttman continues, explaining that team loyalties were so deep that often a man’s funerary inscription would mention his partisanship.

            So deep were the passions for chariot teams that violence between sets of fans was common, with certain rivalries being so inflamed that the rival cities were prohibited from hosting games. Further, identification as a fan of a certain team bound one to a common body that had political clout. Certain colors, as teams were divided by color, were historically affiliated to certain parties. This was true regardless of social rank. “Whatever differences in behavior and even social class there may have been,” Guttman explains, “partisans of both colors moved in much the same world.”

            In Rome it never occurred to me to ask the Ultras why they liked soccer. I never even asked myself why I like it, which for me, as an American male raised in a family of athletes of American football and baseball, was far less likely than Italian males who grew up playing the game. Later, however, when the research demanded an answer to the question, I contacted Federico of Antichi Valori. Predictably, he was stumped when I asked why he liked soccer. He had no answer, as if I asked him why he liked oxygen. When I explained what Markovits and Hellerman proposed, he seemed mildly interested but ultimately just said, “it makes sense.” However, when I told him about Guttman’s portrayal of Roman spectators, he was dumbfounded that he “had never known this deep connection between [the Ultras] and the Romans.” He asked for Guttman’s sources so that he could find them in Latin, excitedly telling me “Rome amazes me almost everyday, even after 37 years.” Sociological theory was one thing, in other words, but Rome, and an Ultra’s connection to Rome, was something else entirely.

            Sorel distinguishes between the “mere observation of facts” and the “inner reason of things” which is found in the myths that motivate “the will to act.” Romanità is attached to the latter. These types of myths, Sorel argues, are strong enough to safeguard utopias that have no just reason to survive, such as the French Republic. Interestingly, Sorel also explains that myths are even capable of guarding against the “invasion of ideas and morals” of the “hostile” bourgeois class. Romanità is certainly used by the Ultras as a bulwark against the bourgeois form of life.

            Through Federico I was introduced to other former members of Antichi Valori; amongst the most dedicated of the Ultras, they are neither completely Left nor Right, but are dedicated instead to Rome. Unlike the imposing and rather menacing skinheads and ideologues of Boys Roma and Padroni di Casa, the four former leaders of Antichi Valori are “clean-cut” professionals and students. Their backgrounds are similar: they are well educated (each having achieved the baccalaureato, or bachelors degree), have steady jobs, steady girlfriends or wives, and live at home or nearby their working parents. They spend as many hours together as possible during the week, often dining out or going to bars to play calcio balilla (table soccer). On summer weekends they go to the beaches near Rome, where table soccer is also widely played. In August they travel abroad or in Trentino.

            What separates these young men from others (outside the Ultras phenomenon) is Romanità. Integral to each of the activities that they undertake together is a sense of pride in being Roman and a sense of duty or responsibility to “defend her honor.” I knew from the history of Antichi Valori that they were extremely steeped in the history of Rome, but through passing time with them away from the stadium I learned just how deeply being an Ultra and living according to its mentalità` can impact one’s life.

            For instance, discussing Romanità with Federico and Fabrizio (another of the founders of the group) in a Monteverde bar the day after AS Roma won the 2006-7 Coppa Italia, Fabrizio made it clear that it was only Romanità that made them different. I had begun by suggesting that willingness to fight was quite important in placing distance between them and non-Ultras. He explained to me that fighting was not a random exercise for the Ultras. Sure, he said, there are some who are “fatto da ferro” (made of iron) and just enjoy fighting but a true Ultra does not fight without cause.

            “We only fight because of Romanità,” he said. “Fight as Ultras?” I asked. “Yes, fight as Ultras,” he replied. Federico interjected something I found most interesting. “We are sons of a vecchia mentalità (old/ancient worldview),” he said. “Fighting is a big part of being an Ultra because we seek a glory that is not provided by the modern world. Instead, we seek an old glory, one made with virtu` (virtue) like Nietzsche described: virtue free of “priggish morality;” a virtue that leads to the strength necessary to do difficult things.” Again, Federico, as had Etore (of AS Roma Ultras) and Manuele (of Fedayn) invoked a Romanità that was prone to violence, a vision distinctly at odds with the Rome of neoliberal Italy.

— Excerpted from Ultras Contra Modernity: Romans at War, coming soon from Arktos Media.



Violent Writing Part One

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A new essay, “The Pathos of Proximity: Violent Writing Part One,” has been published in Trigger Warning, Issue #5: The Dystopia Issue. Before anyone sends me more hate mail for continuing to associate with Rachel Haywire, please note that any collective radical enough for James LaFond is worthy of my time.

While a quick perusal of the other pieces in the issue reveal a united malaise with what “dystopia” can even mean to people living at the end of a tyrannical regime that has demanded that each of us act as his or her own despot, my essay might bring the issue a little closer to home.

As many know, I’ve been a writer with a deep interest in the physiology of violence and its potential to transform the human body and its relationship with its milieu: particularly in making the body incompatible with the contemporary world. “Kill the Last Man inside of you!” … “Become ungovernable!” … that kind of thing. Well, in the process of making myself incompatible, I began to realize that writing might be part of the Last Man I am always in the process of murdering.

The verbish and daring viking or the priestly monk tasked with codifying viking exploits for a sedentary and literary theologized audience? The guerrilla in Anywhere America or the guy who visits the guerrilla’s camp in order to get a scoop? The athlete or the journalist? The hero or the storyteller – Achilles or Homer?

“Some fight with bullets, others with words.” Funny that the bullet fighters never say that. They can’t say it because they know that the instincts being expressed by pipe hitting and writing are not the same. I always knew that, but never let it become an issue in my daily life – writing is the only craft I’ve ever had, unless you count reading – until I made friends with a Serbian variant of Kalashnikov’s gift to humanity.

A mag in, and I smiled: “I want to write a book with you!” Another mag in, and I scoffed, “Only a slave would think about writing while blasting holes in the fabric of time and space with one of these things.” Thus, a conundrum was born, but it didn’t die there in the glare of a destroyed milquetoast face seeking re-election. Instead it followed me home and has been a specter haunting my every move for two months. Something broke loose – whatever it was that allowed me to think that sitting quietly in an air-conditioned library with a computer was a threat to this world.

Either I have to find a way to write the same violence created by the AK, or somehow, a dream is to be deferred.

“Mark, meet Marinetti.”

“Yeah, I’ve known and loved him for years.”

“You did, sure, but you didn’t really know him, did you. You knew the grammar and the words, but you didn’t understand just how hard this whole thing is gonna be. You got the word part down, there’s no doubt. You understand quite well how they operate – their power. Hell you even understand their force – I mean, how many years has it been since you read that obscure note in one of Nietzsche’s notebooks about language being a servant of herd instincts – yet you still seek to use them! Did you ever think about what they were doing to YOU? And for whom?”

All the rat-a-tat-tat and sounds of war – to say nothing of what a real life firefight must do to the body of the victor – all the words about violence: Who are they for? The man who just survived the bombs and bullets or the man who only wants to know about that man from the comfort of his favorite reading chair? If the words associated with my name are to have any value then they must be knowable and transformational to the fighter.

But, the conundrum deepens: would such a man have any use for them?

I slid down the smile of a word, drilled.

 

That is my origin …

 

But I don’t remember if I was expelled

Or if I took my things and slid down

Thinking … it was words that created us.

 

They shaped us, and spread their lines

To control us.

 

But I know that a few men gather

Inside caverns.

In SILENCE.

 

– Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos


The Beginning

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1.

Think back to how it used to be for you … how exciting and exhilarating – how accelerating!: experiencing at once so many forms of self-overcoming – attacking the contemporary world’s overcode, even if only at the slightest level – like arditi and squadristi, freikorps and Stoßtrupp, who rushed so far ahead of what was permitted them that the State and every good thing it contains ran for cover. Bold, daring, actors in the face of history’s implacable tide, fighting to become something that no good person would ever condone. What was to be was never less important than in those heady days, when bands of careless and reckless malcontents envisioned not the end but the beginning.


The Fabulation

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5.

Certainly against the passive, slavish, and moral Last Man, Mussolini proposed a new form of productive and warring nobility; but he also knew that the content of such noble humanity was exceedingly rare, and that the expression that gave rise to its form – namely trincerocrazia (trenchocracy) – was only an answer to democrazia for the men who actually created it in the trenches. The trincerocrazia was created through a collective becoming manifested in fighting, daring, and thriving in Dolomite trenches. It was a transformation – ethical and bodily – of the nature of being human.

It was a becoming-incompatible with the bourgeois form of life. It did not trade one set of universal principles and (e)valuative methodologies for another. Instead it made the fighting man and his experience as such the basis of a new technology of living – one that honored speed, bravery, daringness, precision, violence, and will. It traded a discursive allegiance to universalized abstractions that were couched in natural terms like God, people, nation, and State for a trench-bound allegiance to men who had been created anew – the fabulation of a new man, a new people! – in an arena incompatible with the static belonging available for sale to men in armchairs and smoking salons.

Submission was not an option for these men, and they fought the bourgeois State to the death – at least they did so until Mussolini purged them in order to control their violent refusal to re-enter into the necessary apprenticeship to being-bourgeois that each of us accepts everyday. Submission to the rule of profiteers, priests, and revenuers? The nobility of the trincerocrati was not for sale, nor was their allegiance. Both were only earned – in becoming, not being; their transformation left them incompatible with being bourgeois.


A Statement on Burns

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Any man in revolt is better than no man in revolt.

Any act of aggression against the State provides spaces for other similar acts, as well as opportunities to observe the State’s responses to those acts.

Think like wolves watching the pulsations and undulations of a herd, probing for weaknesses and vulnerabilities.


The Derelict Agōgē Video Series: 01

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