Letters Journal's Blog, page 5
December 3, 2010
Parmenides
November 23, 2010
Changes
November 13, 2010
Considering Myself
Axiom: To write about others is a selfish act. Reflection: If I write honestly, it is in jest or for pleasure. Axiom: I cannot express what I truly love. Problem: What is truly?
When I was a teenager I experimented with writing about myself. I attempted to express what I thought to be radical ideas through the limits set by my own life. My conclusion, which I maintain today, is that what I perceived to be radical ideas could not be expressed within the limits of my own life. They were entirely foreign to my personal experience. So I abandoned them. So I tried to abandon them.
Reflection: Everything I write concerns myself, moreorless. Reflection: All of this takes the form of a confession. Problem: To whom do I confess? Axiom: Rhetoric is the framing of ideas in contexts foreign to the life of the speaker. Problem: If, language is not equivalent to life. Then, all language is rhetoric. Therefore, the previous axiom is false. Problem: One cannot express that which is foreign without that very expression causing the thing expressed to no longer be foreign. Reflection: And so on.
SPEAKING
"Yes, the best thing is to return to Lesson One. And this business of returning is just a figure of speech because we can't be sure that we ever passed by that lesson. It certainly isn't in the program nor should it be. I am referring to Lesson One of our subject for future historians. Everything that we are going to do could be useless or end up in an etcetera, and this could be good or it could be stupid, depending on the contents, quality and impulse of the etcetera. Have you ever thought, sirs, of how terrible it is to say '… and so forth'? Just as when we say, '… forever and ever'. This could be a marvel of stars and of centuries but it could be something trivial, empty, unbearable as well. Let us specify. I am referring, I insist, to our specific subject. What difference does it make if I continue talking or if I stop, and that you pay attention to me or not, facing forwards or sideways?" says Don Julián in Rafael Dieste's TALES AND INVENTIONS OF FÉLIX MURIEL.
Axiom: Every conflict is ultimately a problem of communciation. Problem: Will everything I do end up in an etcetera? Reflection: No.
In October, 2010 I arrived in Asheville, North Carolina to put on a play. The play was written to take the place of a panel discussion about contemporary anarchist practice. The characters in the play corresponded to the real participants on the panel, as well as two members of the audience. The arguments by the characters corresponded roughly to the ideas of the panelists. The panelists were not given the script until five minutes before the panel was to begin, and when they saw it, all of them refused to read from it, despite the script containing many of their objections to scriptedness. I chose to read from the script anyway, though I was nearly prevented from doing so. My script elicited a few laughs in what was otherwise a boring and unheated exchange of fantasies. A few people talked about performing the script later, but they did not do so. The script was never made available online.
Trivial. Empty. Unbearable. Let us specify.
November 9, 2010
Considering John Zerzan
Years ago, I mailed a copy of my small photocopied journal to Green Anarchy magazine. I addressed a short note to John Zerzan, an editor of the magazine whom I had met years before and found extraordinarily polite, a politeness at odds with the occasionally acerbic tone of his polemical writing and internet presence. My journal was divergent from the political and aesthetic choices of the late Green Anarchy magazine, but I hoped that John would offer a few choice criticisms, even a witty dismissal that highlighted my apparent failure to adequately criticize and reject what he may have called 'the totality of postmodern industrial civilization' or something along those lines.
Several weeks after sending the journal and the note, I received a short hand-written reply from John. It was written on the same piece of paper on which I penned my original note to him, with a line drawn between my short pleasantries and his curt dismissal. His note said, in so many words, that Green Anarchy was not interested in reviewing communist bullshit and that I was a leftist, to be cut off entirely from the anti-civilization discourse. I can only assume my journal made its way to the trash without being read.
On the one hand, his dismissal made sense. My journal was not an expression of anti-civilization anarchism, and my desire to see it reviewed in Green Anarchy was patronizing: I wanted to see what the crazies in Oregon had to say about my latest thing but had no intention of contributing to their project in any way. On the other hand, I expected at least some recognition of the brief but friendly encounter we had shared, and I was struck by the immediate falsity of his Zerzan's claim. At the time, Green Anarchy had just published a series of essays about Jacques Camatte, a French communist. I wrote him back expressing my confusion, but I never heard from him again.
I revisit this incident today to defend John Zerzan's legacy and to awkwardly and publicly extend a hand to him, after all these years, knowing that my extended hand ought not to be received, that what I am writing leaves no room for a friendship to come.
JOHN ZERZAN, IDIOT PROPHET
From my first encounter with his writing, I was always struck by his unreadability: the paucity of the prose, the overreliance on quotations, the repetition, the weaknesses and contradictions in argument, the self-serving selection of scientific and anthropological research, the barely masked personal grudges, and so on. John Zerzan's failures as a writer and thinker are innumerable, and many of these failures have been listed again and again by his enemies.
Let the lists grow longer.
These failures and weaknesses are, in fact, the greatest testament to Zerzan's power and importance. In spite of, or, perhaps, because of these shortcomings, John Zerzan, more than any other thinker, has profoundly influenced the trajectory and scope of radical theory. His unreadable books were not read; they were dissolved into the very core of the anarchist rejection of society. And despite the effort of every single anarchist political faction (including Zerzan himself), the bleak and hateful truth at the heart of his thinking remains, gnawing at us, cutting away at our steadiness, at our faiths and our nightmares.
The idiot prophet cannot become a king. He must remain a cancer, a Cassandra, salt in the cut.
Was he not right when pointed out the leftism at the heart of insurrectionary anarchism, an ideology that has excised the critique of technology from its discourse? Did he not earnestly articulate a spiritual turn today embraced by those who laughed at him at him then? To say that his criticisms were spoken in the voice of a shrill or bumbling fool says nothing of their truth; the idiot prophet cannot become a king. And so it was, again and again. And so it will be.
SILENCE
In my parting with him, Zerzan gave me a challenge I have not yet taken on. He set out a difficult and terrifying proposition that I still cannot accept, even if I know it is the only task remaining for me and all those who shackle themselves to a rejection of the world.
John Zerzan's words are an unheard note that might precede insurrection, a whisper warning us that insurrection is not what we presume it to be. As the lights turn on and the tempting hum and roar of this world drag us from bed, let us remember the one who brought us here, the one who may guide us in the days of true reckoning to come. Let us find the strength to live out his challenge.
October 26, 2010
Arguments
1. G-d exists because G-d cannot be expressed. 2. The English word "God" is incoherent. It lacks definition. It is, at best, a question (ie. which God?, what sort of God?, etcetera), but it primarily functions as an expression of dishonesty. 3. One writes G-d as an acknowledgment of the limits of human language. Hebrew demonstrates this limit; the language lacks a word for G-d and communicates entirely in euphemism – King of the Universe, My Lord, etcetera. 4. G-d is not logical; G-d exists entirely outside of logic. If one presupposes G-d's omnipotence, there is the obvious paradox. 5. G-d is other even to otherness. 6. G-d persists as a lack, as a problem both inexpressible and unavoidable. G-d exists in this problem outside any argument or doubt. 7. G-d's inexpressibility is explained in the Talmud as exile. 8. The universe exists because it is expressed; G-d is that which expresses it. 9. The inability of the universe to express G-d – the inability of one to express that which is one is expressed by – is the problem of communication. 10. G-d is the radical limit of language; therefore, it is the beginning of the anti-political communist adventure. 11. The adventure is doomed but remains, at heart, the only fundamentally optimistic project in a world ruled by the anarchy and nihilism of the market.
And so it is as it shall be.
October 23, 2010
Livitsky's Brother
Reinhart Brodsky Livitsky's brother was casual. He cornered strangers every Friday morning, as the birds realized their turn and the crowd was still and just and half awake. He was called Christopher and cornered strangers, not all of them women, before retiring to his space and cornering himself. For Christopher Mendel Livitsky the right angle was an immeasurable and infinite heaven. The right angle was perfect in its impossibility or, as he hoped in the seconds before falling asleep each night, its rarity. The right angle, like the straight line or the circle ("perfect" is a redundant adjective when discussing circles, which are, by definition, perfect. An imperfect circle is not a circle; it is an oval.), does seem to exist in nature. A craftsmen is restricted by his hands and his tools. An artist is restricted by his hands and his tools. A machine is restricted by its construction and its programming. Light is restricted by gravity and purpose. Nature is always curving imprecisely, but somewhere – perhaps in G-d's infinite wisdom, or against G-d infinite wisdom, or against the roundness of it all, or in mathematical accident, or without prejudice to reality, or in effortless coincidence, or in reasonable laceration, or somehow in a socialist realist portrait of V.I. Lenin's nose, or in between these – a right angle might exist.
October 5, 2010
Symposium
Beginning from the idea that the privileging of spoken language over written language is a mistake (see Phonocentrism), that communicating with written language through a digital apparatus is no more mediated or false than communicating face-to-face with spoken language, I invite you to participate in the first Letters Journal Digital Symposium.
The Symposium will be conducted with Gmail Chat on Wednesday, October 27th at 7 PM EST. To participate, please send your Gmail chat username to lettersjournal(at)gmail.com at any time before the Symposium is scheduled to begin.
The topics for the first Letters Journal Digital Symposium will be: The Limits of Uses of Logic and Fiction. Future topics and dates will be announced during the Symposium and will not be announced publicly. If you wish to participate in future Symposiums but cannot attend the first, please send three sentences explaining both your absence and proposing one future topic.
Each Symposium, in whole or part, may be reproduced in future issues of Letters or on the website you are currently viewing.
Once the collected Symposiums have accumulated a predetermined number of words, participants will march to snow covered fields and shoot down proletarians like partridges. While languishing in prisons for these crimes, participants will pen novels of profound beauty and sadness that will be serialized in Letters Journal until we are all dead.
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September 22, 2010
Two
-what is sharing?
-what is shared?
-who shares?
-is sharing a subversive practice?
-is sharing a function or role within capitalism?
-does sharing have to be reciprocal?
-is "giving" sharing?
-how does reciprocation differ from an exchange relationship?
-is there a difference between "capitalist" sharing and a more genuine, open, emotional sharing?
-if so, what are indicators of this difference?
-is sharing useful to capitalism as diffusion during times of crisis?
-is the sharing...
One
Once upon a time, two brothers lived together in a small house in the windy highlands. The older brother was bookish and bright – the younger, a moderately reputable cobbler from the nearby village. Together they shared both ideas and material goods, and in their cohabitation, shared being with one another, resulting in a satisfying life for each. One stormy autumn evening they heard a rapping upon the door of their house. "Who may it be?" they asked, and the younger brother...
