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Unlearn

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14.

The neo-liberal State governs not so much by making specific demands on the body but by controlling bodily access to, and use of, space and infrastructure. It needn’t tell us in overtly dominating terms, “Go Here Now!” because we will go where we are supposed to be without ever thinking beyond the choices that we are free to make. Our milieu will always offer choices … When we drive in our neighborhood after dark, we play a game: Cop or Not a Cop! It started as a way to involve the whole family in a counter-surveillance system designed to protect ourselves from the enforcement of child restraint laws; but gradually, and because in roughly two years of playing we have seen exactly two cops patrolling the streets of our neighborhood, it has become a pedagogical tool for demonstrating the powers of passivity and the awe inspiring expression of instincts made to serve the State and Capital. “If there are no cops here, then there are no laws,” my son understands. “But T, I say, the laws are inside each and every one of us. I am a cop. Mamma is a cop, because we police ourselves. We obey, and deep in our bowels, our bodies rejoice.” “What?”

A proud mamma explained to me that her son was accepted for kindergarten at a private school. “Money, [blah blah blah], and he passed the psychological evaluation!!” “The what?”

So I did an experiment: “T which is good: an ice cream cone or a hand grenade?” “A hand grenade! No, wait, both!” “Bravo son, but you just failed the psychological evaluation that would’ve put you on the path to wage slavery.” “Hey T, what is your favorite football team?” The son looks at me askance … “T, what are the relative merits of an AK series carbine compared to the M-16?” “AK’s will function even when dirty.” “Bravo son.” Some choices are more valuable than others because they add something to Life that cannot be so easily codified by the State and Capital. I wrestle with books, bourbon, and bullets: not all of our choices serve the State, even if ALL of our choices can serve the State. It depends on what is added to the taxable portion of our assemblages. The neo-liberal State governs in ways never imagined by previous forms of government:  by providing access to legal and profitable milieus of habit and governable circumstance.

This past Sunday at the grocery, every single person in the ransacked store, black or white, asked me something about the Super Bowl. I had no great or pithy responses to their questions (the “I don’t know, I don’t watch TV,” response is getting old, so I just played it cool, “Yeah, some becoming-herd dude is gonna feel totally justified and gratified by what his life is capable of in a few hours.”) Not too pithy; and then I get back home. You see, I purposely waited until 5:30 to go to the store so that I wouldn’t have to play the game, but back home I see my Mexican neighbors down the street. “Hey Mark,” one of them says, “we are having a Super Bowl party if you want to come down.”

Even the Mexicans. Not the Mexicans too! I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I’d much rather have “All the stores will open up if you say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick up!” than, “A white dude, a black guy, some Mexicans, and even a Jew bought a Coke. Period.”

In other words, the State governs by creating an environment that promotes and sustains the thriving of a specific form of human life – by providing a milieu of maximum comfort and ease (one needn’t hunt for or slaughter food, walk long distances in an airport – George Costanza rejoices! – walk at all, chop wood, or climb stairs) as well as a set of discourses on morality, altruism, and behavior that coincide with an entire psychological, anthropological, and biological science of being human so as to precisely codify this form of life/mode of being human.

And it does so largely in the name of freedom – a singular embodiment of the sanctity of this milieu: all progress, success, and meaning is demonstrated in one’s mastery of comfort and leisure. Even the rights and constitutional guarantees of liberal governance point to such a slavish and capitalistic basis of freedom – and truly protect little more than that in the vast realm of potential human behaviors. We remember that American racial segregation was ended with interstate commerce and access to new markets in mind – and this is not to say that morality didn’t play a role, for what could be more moral than freedom?

The agōgē, as it was for the Spartans, assumes that the human is created – not born – by a long associative interaction with certain precise configurations of technologies and techniques (culinary, agricultural, musical, lyrical, erotic, martial, spatial, relational, etc.) that come to prominence largely through our extended apprenticeship with language and narratives.

When these technologies and techniques are circumvented, short-circuited, or better yet, created anew with a view to an-other form of life, then we begin to play with the powers previously reserved for gods and nature (as the State sacralizes or naturalizes this process in order to erase its role in creating the conditions of our servility). We begin to understand just how creative is the human in his/her relationship with life: to wit the effort put into making sure that we never step beyond the stories we are given to explain ourselves and the world.



Expect Resistance

The Derelict Agōgē Video Series: 02

Night Song

What a Beautiful Image!

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If the State changes (from liberal to welfare to neoliberal) how much does our condition change? If Capitalism homogenizes or promotes difference only in a commodifying manner, what does it change for our ability to accurately identify lines of flight or road blocks?

I listened to a podcast this morning about Whites being displaced in South Africa. It was really interesting because both the interviewer and interviewee (a White Afrikaner gun dealer) were essentially conservatives. The Afrikaner couldn’t articulate why the Whites don’t fight for themselves in South Africa, but intimated that it is because they still see the State as a kind of birthright, with a set of just laws that have merely been perverted: the classic bourgeois fantasy of the benign prince, whom we are all lucky to serve, being taken advantage of by his most humble servants. But what was really fascinating was a description of how the Black South Africans openly mocked the Whites for paying taxes, and then immediately used the tax money to enrich themselves and their tribes. It’s like the Whites were being kept alive by the State as tax slaves. What a beautiful image!

The Whites are so enslaved to the ideas of “nation” and “order” that even when both are absent they will continue to work to fund them.

I’m wondering if the opportunity this presents depends on an obvious outside. Rome wants to tell us that it controlled territory but how could that be possible? Rome controlled men. Civilization is an apparatus of policing and taxing.

A market, a barracks, and a courthouse.

So how much must one resist that apparatus in order to prepare for an open war against this form of civilization that might not happen for 100 years? The key for me is that the war is ongoing. Always. Even if seemingly dormant. For some, though, it is less dormant than others … the barracks does create opportunities of rapid and brutal deterritorialization that remain oblivious to the other sites of civilizational force. In the barracks, the body is suddenly freed from the signpost of bourgeois civilization: the prohibition against violence (unless committed by the State against its enemies).

There’s certainly a threshold that guys who have actually seen combat have crossed, but there are long stretches of time where the military isn’t actively engaging in combat but they are still able to be combatants. But the culture is shaped by the interaction of actual violence, and the further the military gets from that the less effective it is as a tool for releasing men from their slavish potentialities: it’s the contact with violence, not the context of violence, that imparts the value.

So, the enemy is not simply something that can be designated once we’ve detached ourselves from all our determinations, once we’ve transported ourselves to who knows what political or philosophical plane.

For anyone who starts from where they are, from the milieu they frequent, the territory they inhabit, the frontline defines itself based on the matter at hand, the contact.

Who is working for the State? Who is afraid of getting involved? Who will take risks for the group? What are we willing to attack? What will we back away from? Upon what do we, and it, rely?

The answers to these questions are not based on unilateral decisions but on experience itself, from situation to situation, from encounter to encounter. But the important point is that contact is always already happening, from first to last breath.

Hugh Maguire and Mark Dyal


Giorgetto Romano

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Men who battle for one another, and who feel quite at home in the various cages that comprise the settori ospiti of Italian soccer stadiums, don’t often make their greatest impressions with warmth, generosity, and humor; Giorgetto Romano might have been a big, bad son-of-a-bitch, but I’ll always remember how gracious and hilarious he was. An immense Ultra, as full of Romanità as anyone could be, and an ally to anyone in giallorosso … To die at this moment, in the midst of Curva Sud Roma’s greatest crisis – as a shining example of how joyful must be our fight … perhaps tomorrow the tragic poem will be easier to bear.

 

Ultras in lutto … questa è la Roma!!!

 


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The Purge

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Last night I had occasion to meet some interesting and energetic students that have found themselves drawn to the coming insurrection. They were each brash, proud, and defiant: in a word, dangerous. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, how long they would be able to maintain their smiles and dangerous energy in the often-toxic environment of the radical fringe. Don’t get me wrong; toxicity can be a sign of vigorous health, as it demonstrates that even those with a gift for atrophy have yet to give up the will to fight.

 

That being said, though, the wall that we are up against has been demolished and conquered many times in our past, but only with the critical and violent participation of smiling, energetic, brash, proud, and defiant young people. And the true toxicity of the radical fringe more often than not stems from the effort of tired, redundant, cautious, hyper-organized, makers of mass media influenced grievance-lists to keep hold of the wheel of what must ultimately become a runaway freight train. These scared list makers, as they have done in every revolutionary milieu since a man first decided that he would no longer submit, must hold the violent actors in check, using the same methodological thought policing and behavioral prohibitioning as the mainstream enemies of the radical fringe.

 

Moralistic orthodoxy and static analyses reliant upon a soft, quiet, democratic milieu are demanded by the list makers, while the young – the arditi, Futurists, freikorps, sans-culottes – seek the thrill of violently and aggressively throwing off the humility, timidity, and bodily poverty that is demanded of them. At the very least, then, we can say that the critical and violent young people among us seek to become a force that will one day be purged from whatever victorious nation is to be created by the list makers. They wish to fight without obeying, which is what the list makers, those men of the State, cannot abide.

 

“In every [State] it is a matter of obeying and nothing else.”[1] It is perhaps too simplistic to say that this critique of the State is precisely what maintains the links between the fringe’s list makers and their mainstream “state-sponsored” counterparts, but a quick glance at the American, French, Confederate, Soviet, Fascist, and Cuban revolutions, will demonstrate three clear trends: that the ends of the State are the same ends of the ruling apparatuses of the revolutionaries; that those rulers are able to impose their orthodoxies and ideas upon the revolutionary environment only because that ecosystem was given life by the critical and violent; and that once the ruling ideas and orthodoxies can be securely policed, the critical and violent are then purged from the revolution.

 

The critical and the violent – the most radical and dangerous element of the revolution – have been seen to move the power of acting so far beyond the obligation to obey that they become too dangerous even for the fringe.

 

What excites us the most in this future scenario is when thinking itself moves beyond the obedience and orthodoxy demanded by the ruling apparatuses. When the guerrillas – the critical and violent fighters – take over the revolution – when they set in motion the fabulation of a new people, when they, in other words, set in motion the machinery of the counter-revolutionary purge that will surely be their demise – they make knowable the stasis and cowardice demanded by all regimes, none more so than the narratives that have organized their very bodies. Each of their violent acts demonstrate that Ideals, The Truth, merit, good, and evil have more to do with obedience – and disobedience – than with divinity and the cogito; and that the State they are working to destroy still lurks in their every thought.

 

They demonstrate that the demand for calm discourse and rational analysis, while being the singular condition of engaging in bourgeois politics, is more importantly the symptom of thought being stripped of its agile, aggressive, and most dangerous capacities: the tortoise beating the hare! But in this light, the State has always served this purpose: the organization of instincts and thinking into institutional settings that allow the governing powers of Truth, habit, morality, and now opinion to flourish at the expense of the destructive vitality that promises the creation of life anew.[2] These powers, so skillfully erected in our minds, become the very bases of brain functioning: rationality can certainly be shown to be the tool of the democratic and “State-sponsored” morality du jour.

 

And thus, the true becoming-revolution that is ultimately manifested in the vortex of the francotirador is part and parcel of the critical and violent undercutting of our own State-sponsored minds and brains. While the State seeks above all to assure a minimum of chaos and variance – we are governed against them from within – the critical and violent young fighters demand just that. They demand a derelict moment, a void, an interval of chaos between thinking and acting. “Let the grievance-list makers have their social clubs,” they say, “in which new orthodoxies and Ideals can be pasted onto the tablets of the State that we fight to destroy. We instead, wish to fight and then be purged, in the name of the chaos that no State can abide.”

[1] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, pg. 3

[2] Gregg Lambert, In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism, pgs. 187-191

Interregnum

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I was recently hosted by the fine gentlemen of the Interregnum Podcast for a midday chat about Ultras; Rome; and dissident versus academic life.

 


Hated & Proud

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At long last my first book, Hated and Proud, has been published by Arktos Media. It is available in eBook, softcover, and hardcover from ArktosAmazon, and wherever dissident books are sold. Hated and Proud began its life as the dissertation requirement of a Ph.D. in Anthropology. As such it still remains a deeply theoretical book, albeit one that, in my eyes, reads with a furious affirmation of the life of the Roman Ultra, and a defiant negation of the bourgeois consumerist life that we inherit as Western men and women.

Once upon a time, Jack Donovan suggested that the book would be more effective as a memoir accounting for my own “becoming-Ultra;” and indeed, I made several attempts to re-create it in a more conversational style. However, in the end, I still wanted Hated and Proud to be an example of dissident scholarship, and, more mundanely, I just really enjoyed the book in the form in which it was eventually published: as an exposition of theory drawn from an aggressive, often violent milieu of radical, organized, intensely prideful, and political soccer fans.

Rest assured, though, that between each line of every page, there lies an unspoken struggle between a man who once loved credentials, authority, comfort, leisure, quality fabrics, expensive meals, fine wine, and all of the trappings of a life well lived; and a man who would violently tear away his obedience to the meanings and behaviors necessary to reduce a life to such a slavish and mediocre reality.

Perhaps mention could have been made in the book of a small apartment without air-conditioning, 104-degree summer days, and a feverish exploration of Nietzsche’s demolition of the modern world’s necessary human type. But in the moment – in the act of recreating one’s life from the still-smoldering ashes of one’s own plebeianism – there was little need for reflection; for reflection was one of the instinctual activities that I was actively overcoming. My entire life had been spent “reflecting,” and now it felt like bovine contentment. I needed explosive action in a perilous sea, afraid not for my well-being but instead, of ever again seeing the world through “normal” eyes. I needed aggression so as to think. I needed hatred and hostility so as to transvaluate all that I had once loved and embraced.

I did reflect, though; especially on how useless Nietzsche had once seemed – hell, not even “once” or “seemed” – as if it was merely a question of happenstance: Nietzsche had been useless in the Academy. Hmm, no. He had been useless TO the Academy. I used him here and there as a theorist among theorists. I had become disenchanted with the idea that language merely represents reality when I was in Graduate School and Nietzsche had helped me to begin exploring the limits of representation. Those extracurricular explorations eventually led me to Deleuze, but I just couldn’t figure out how to move language beyond its bourgeois limits – at least, not until I got to Rome. But when I arrived in Rome, Nietzsche and Deleuze were distant memories. I was there to find out the why and how of violent, politically motivated soccer fans. Nothing in my proposal research had led me to “Nietzsche.” I was ready to study voting behaviors and to ask questions about race, class, and gender.

That plan lasted all of two months, as the Ultras themselves couldn’t be bothered a single bit to engage my earnest American – “Hey! I’m from New York City and I’m getting a Ph.D. in Anthropology and please sign here and answer the following questions” – research project. Then one day, an older “retired” Ultra threw me a life preserver (Ha! Yeah, he threw me a life destroyer!): “If you want to understand the Ultras,” he said, “you need to read Nietzsche.” Nietzsche. I still don’t understand how he knew, and I could’ve asked him a thousand times over the next year. But I did come to find out why he read Nietzsche and what he had gotten from it; and that was enough for me, for it was exactly what I was getting from it. But would it have been the same for everyone? I don’t think either of us cared to know, and it wasn’t until I left Rome that I realized just how vital that place and that milieu had been to my reading and understanding of Nietzsche.

If any surveillance database worthy of the name exists, it surely started a file on my name and Monteverde address in early-2007, as I went home from that fateful lunch at Da Francesco and did one of my favorite things in this or any life: I bought some books! Being literate allows us to look back in time, through the eyes of a debt-recording accounts manager, to learn when and what I received and devoured:

10 February Thus Spoke Zarathustra

24 February The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols

16 March Writings from the Late Notebooks, Daybreak

21 March The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil

15 June Untimely Meditations, The Gay Science

11 July On the Genealogy of Morality

Looking now at the “chronology,” I see the arrogance of the all-so-many: instead of approaching hat-in-hand, an ignorant but eager neophyte at the door of a master, I haughtily assumed myself worthy of starting at the highest peak in the Nietzsche canon. I’m sure I stumbled through Zarathustra for those two weeks, realized the deep water into which my project was certain to sink, and decided to start anew with something more legible to a man of prose. Indeed, the Anti-Christ “collection” (Cambridge University Press) and then the Late Notebooks (Cambridge’s loose collection of notes spanning 1885 to 1888) set me ablaze. The rest is less “history” than the becoming-useless-to-modernity of a human male.

(For readers interested in reading Nietzsche, I humbly but staunchly recommend beginning with the Genealogy; proceeding to The Gay Science [especially Book Five], the Anti-Christ, and Twilight; then the Untimely Meditations and the Late Notebooks. Only at that point I would suggest reading Zarathustra.)

Thus, my wife and I were joined by a travelling companion – Nietzsche became my eyes, and I never went anywhere without him. That being said, the use made of Nietzsche in Hated and Proud is rough around the edges; it is shorn of the subtlety required by the Academy and its static, quiet thinkers – but it is in the subtlety that Nietzsche’s power and regenerating potential is often lost. Instead, I found and used what I’ve always called, “Nietzsche for street fighters.” This is a Nietzsche very much focused on the first level of transvaluation: what our enemies think. The second level came later, especially as I returned to America and Deleuze: how our enemies think. It was having moved to that “second level” that made editing Hated and Proud so difficult. Gutting it for the sake of insights gained far from Rome – far from that field of battle – would not only have created a much more confusing narrative, but also, and more importantly, would have erased the very thing that Jack Donovan had suggested would strengthen the book: the person who wrote it.

None of this is necessary to find Hated and Proud useful, however. Instead one just needs a willingness to make a problem of his or her own weakness, comfort, and desire for safety.

Welcome to Hated and Proud.

 

 

Hated & Proud Photos

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Arktos was generous enough to allow me to include some photos in Hated and Proud. These are dispersed throughout the text and appear in black and white. However, given that color plays such a significant role in the book, I would like to share them here in all of their glory. In the coming days I will add more photos that compliment the various places and events in Hated and Proud.

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