Language, Perception, and Enemies

[Littleblackcart]

Hello again, fellow GR-ers!

We want to start a discussion about the question what do we call who and what we're fighting, and how that naming influences what we do and don't do, what we emphasize and ignore.

In Against (His)story, Against Leviathan, Fredi Perlman introduces the name "leviathan" for the monster that does the bad things (not all bad things, but many of them). So leviathan speaks to people not being and also choosing not to be agents in their own lives, for civilization as an overwhelming and alienating force, and so on.

Other terms that people use for what anarchists (at least) are against are, "the status quo," "the establishment," John Zerzan talks about "the Totality," and of course there's always the standby, "the ruling class." Aragorn! talked about "the grey," at least in his raccoon and bear fables for anarchists.

How do those terms aim us in directions (or away: for example, towards environmental issues, away from worker empowerment issues, and vice versa, and so on); what other terms have you seen or used that worked for you (and where did you find them); what term(s) do you tend to use to describe what you're aiming away from... and all like that!

[Dot]

The grey is great for me in certain ways. Though most people haven't read the Aragorn! zines that they come from, grey as a metaphor for a nebulous, alienated life is pretty consistent with normal usage. Its lack of definition and its reference to mood as much as to anything else, can be a nice anodyne to excessively materialistic labels. But it's more of an opening to a conversation, precisely because it's so unclear.

Sometimes I just want a quick label, that still does justice (edit: nods to, not does justice to. how could a quick label do justice!) to the breadth and depth of the issues, and then leviathan or the totality will work (one or the other depending on who I'm talking to). Although the totality also feels kind of like a joke, at the same time. Like, of course anarchists are against everything. That sense of both serious and joking (teenage angst reminiscent) is fun. Both of those two are mostly owned by anti-civ folks, which is ok, but also not exactly what I want sometimes.

Anyway, looking forward to what other folks use.

[Dim]

I think a useful one for me has been "Spectacle", both as a young person becoming political (elections are just spectacle man!) and currently. Current thinking has shifted more towards the ways in which we, meaning literally everyone in society including bosses and cops and shit, are under a number of spells: capitalism, hierarchy, authority, blah blah blah. Spectacle helps to make a crack in those spells, even if only a tiny one, to see the ways in which we're all conditioned and played in society.

Unfortunately I think Spectacle also lends itself to lazy analysis, with people just making a binary of spectacle vs. authentic, and always landing on the *good* side.

[Dot]

Yea, people talk about spectacle as if it's just advertising. :(
To me, the Spectacle riffs visuals and definitely alienation. But it has a static quality. I like Leviathan for that implication of motion (like with juggernaut) .

note: Both Lev and Spectacle refer to bodies of writing, so they work to make folks sound smart. That's fun ;)

[aa]

I'm drawn to all of these words: Leviathan, spectacle, the gray. I like that they label an almost spiritual poverty, which implies that many people suffer from this way of life, not just those materially impoverished. As someone who has never lacked food, but who wants to live in a different way than this society allows me, they appeal to me.

That said, I've encountered some ideas which make me question how apt "the gray" is to describe this way of life. Or, perhaps what I'm aiming at here is the abstract breadth of subsuming everything under one label, like "the totality".

I used to think that commodification leads to spiritual impoverishment. That is, that making something all about the money leads to an evacuation of other meanings, and to make the thing less apt to invoke feelings. But where do Beethoven’s 9th Symphony or classical composition in general fit into this? Beethoven composed and performed in the 19th century, well into the reign of “capitalism” (yeah it’s a broad thing). We see many things we don’t like structurally here: intense division of labor between musicians, a split between the mind and body with the composer and musicians who follow his orders. If you think about how they’re structured, classical music orchestras sound pretty bad and authoritarian, right? But I find that music beautiful.

Perhaps we can reply by saying something like art is where humanity’s creativity is relegated under capitalism, and without it we would all be creative authors of our own lives. But I think that the sophisticated level of organization, discipline, and division of labor of classical music actually can create a higher level of artistry. In the essay “Loving Music: Listeners, Entertainments, and the Origins of Music Fandom in Nineteenth-Century America”, media history academic Daniel Cavicchi writes that mid-19th century, new systems of concert management led to classical musicians touring around the country, which hadn’t happened before. Before that, he writes,

“music had primarily existed either as a private amateur pastime, made among friends and family, or as an elaborate public ritual, either in street parades or at church services. One could love it, but its embeddedness in social functions made more likely that one loved that which the music enabled. But commodification encouraged an attachment to music’s own singular effects. Concerts and public performances, especially, segmented musical experience into distinct phases of production (composition), distribution (performance), and consumption (listening). Understanding musical experience as a thing that one could anonymously purchase and consume must have been an extraordinary idea for people used to having to painstakingly make sounds, through singing or playing, in order to have “music” in the first place”

He writes that in the diaries he read, these new music lovers (fans) would go out to see performances multiple times a week. They adored it and many seemed obsessed. In contrast, the diary entries about music before this time were mild, they’d write things about music like “it was very satisfactory” or “we had a pleasant time” or even “we had some music.” But starting with the touring musician phenomenon, people became swept up “fans” of music.

I bring this up to pose a problem. We would think that segmenting musical experience into those phases or specialties as a bad thing: it makes consumers and specialists. But doing so created experiences that certainly couldn’t be classified as “the gray.” If you think about fandom in general, and how much people freak out over their favorite sports team, tv show, celebrity, or musical group, it’s clear that many people don’t experience these commodities as anything like “the gray.” And I personally don’t like subsuming the beautiful things that appeal to me in this world as the same “totality” of prisons and work.

Another reason I’m becoming skeptical of such totalizing concepts is that I suspect our motives are less than ideal in deploying them. In “The First Urban Christians” historian Wayne Meeks discusses how Paul, arguably the inventor of Christianity, used language like “the world” and “this world” when referring to the Hellenic pagan world around the early Christians, basically everything that wasn’t the nascent Christian church he was helping to build. Meeks writes that this was done as a way of designating who and what didn’t belong to their groups, and more importantly, who did belong. Through othering people, creating a boundary, he creates a group. All this while those Christians weren’t actually that different from the society they were in: the early church was basically a combination of Jewish apocalyptic, burial societies, philosophy schools, mystery cults, and social clubs, all of which were established institutions at that period.

So, in using “the totality” or "existent" or other totalizing concepts like that, I wonder if we are just trying to make ourselves feel like we’re different, and to give us cohesion as a distinct group.

I hope this isn’t too much of a tangent. Just some polemic thoughts. I’ve been reading about fandom and media theory recently because they conflict with a lot of Frankfurt School-inspired ideas which are pretty foundational for me.

[Dot]

I think your comment is on point (questioning the framework that the OP set up, always valid). The bottom lines you're making, if I understand correctly, are a) authoritarian systems can make beautiful things that are not available (or are extremely unlikely?) in a more egalitarian culture, and b) that any single word that lumps everything bad together is inherently part of a way of thinking that is part of that bad stuff.
Let me know if I didn't understand something, of course.


I don't think either of those points are arguable. None the less, I, for one, still look for a word--when I'm trying to make some other point, usually--that is sufficiently clear and yet not distracting, not requiring a whole paragraph to explain when I'm trying to get somewhere else. I guess a more coherent response is that communicating at all is dangerous (as is not communicating), so we have to pick our dangers in given situations.


Another way to ask the original question might have been, how do we decide which dangers to pick (within the given framework)?
and, For which audiences do we use which terms?

edit: not that I'm saying LBC should've written the question differently! Would never criticize! lol...

[aa]

a. I'm arguing something like that. Maybe I'm questioning whether it makes sense to use totalizing concepts like "authoritarian systems" and "a more egalitarian culture" as if they have agency which creates things. I'm noticing I value art and novels more lately than before, and I think that it makes more sense to say that people are responding to or situated in an "authoritarian system" and using its tools to create things. Which, yes, may be very beautiful and hard to envision in an egalitarian society.

b) Yes, that sounds right. Ascribing all that agency to one thing, "the totality" or "the existent", undervalues the ways people in these systems make do within and sometimes against them. For me, it makes me hardly notice them, and think "oh well, that's just how people are behaving in this shitty context" or something like that.

Thanks for asking if you don't understand something since I feel like I only half understand what I'm trying to say.

Fair point that communicating one word may be dangerous, but so is failing to communicate. Instead of one word, I think I say something like "systems of domination and exploitation that structure this society." I'm sure this is also inadequate for many reasons.

I definitely shift how I'm talking based on the audience. The goals I have, which don't change regardless of who I'm talking to, are to be understandable and concise while not watering things down. Unless I'm talking to an authority figure or someone I shouldn't be honest with of course.

[Dot]

Even the term "more egalitarian" makes me bristle, actually, and I know I'm the one who started using it. Maybe the next question can be about the terms we use for the things we like. ha.

As for what will be created in a better society/what wouldn't be that we'd miss, I think that people have the capacity to find beauty in many ways, and in many things.

I also think it's fair to say that some big dramatic shift in the way people interact with each other will be hard, and it will be for the ones born to it to determine/understand what is beautiful for them, right? The saying "we can't get there from here" is partly referring to that idea.

Your phrase "systems of" etc is fair. I like some pithiness though!

[Tom]

I haven't had this kind of conversation with someone in a while - one where I'd be labeling a big thing we're against. Once I read perlman I enjoyed leviathan, being such a multifaceted, absorbing beast, and another aspect of that being like you said aa this idea of creativity being trapped in art, the spirit and magic being trapped in the temple.

I still enjoy punchy shorthand terms such as "society" or "the world" (or to quote the wild one, when asked what we're against, "whadda you got?" But perhaps those are better suited to banners than conversations.

aa - we should discuss fandom sometime!

[Littleblackcart]

"Society" was appealing partly because it was funny. It was such a hand-waving, youth-tastic, "whatta ya got" kind of answer, both true and also impossibly vague. I want more of those--multiple layers=good!

[Jeremy]

I like the term "the grey," as it poetically describes the Leviathan in a starkly visual manner, epitomized in the city-scape. I think Aragorn intended it in this way, as when one observes the cities, suburbs, and other encroachments of human society into the wild (in a physical sense), one sees the color grey swallowing the greens, blues, etc. of the wild. Certainly this is how racoon people and bear people would describe Leviathan.

[Dot]

Speaking of layers--I use grey more for the metaphorical space between or outside of polarities (ie, grey instead of black/white), but there's a way that that also works for grey-as-the-enemy.

In these times of heavy polarization, it's easy to forget (or never have known) when there was a lot more prevarication, and "it's complicated" was an excuse to not do anything, instead of something to deepen activity. I mean, I guess that's still the case a lot, but it doesn't get as much play when most are preoccupied with the simplistic binary...

[Dim]

I really enjoy the aesthetic portion of the grey that Jeremy points out, both literally and in metaphor space. I'm now thinking about what other kind of sensory metaphors we could use for the big bad.

My first thought was something olfactory, like putrefaction, however rotting and decomposition are actually awesome (in organic matter, and in alchemical ways), so maybe the clean sterile smell of disinfectant? Interested if others have ideas.