we should all make manifestos
A is For…
History is a series of struggles between the oppressor and the oppressed. Anarchists are a brave group of souls willing to stand in the way of an invisible monster, and by no means is this issue the crux of their actions. I do not mean to trivialize the anarchist struggle by focusing on an issue that many do not take seriously, but as an amateur linguist and late-night tagger, I am fascinated by our symbolic world and how we create meaning from a representational standpoint. This is a small analysis on one of the myriad of ways anarchists attempt to publicly display their ideologies to the general public, and what I’m interested in is the reaction achieved from this commonly seen image, and the meaning derived from one seeing the first letter in the alphabet out of its traditional context. Ultimately, I feel the issue is a matter of solidarity or division. That is, does the symbolic A carry a positive or negative connotation to those who are not anarchists, does it serve to further polarize or unite the public? Is it simply about solidarity between anarchists, letting a punk see that she is not alone? Or is it an attempt to show the public that things do not have to be this way, that if you are not happy there are others who agree with you?
We’ve all been walking down an urbanized strip of city and seen it scrawled in a back alley-way, painted on a business’s wall or etched on a dumpster. The infamous, circled Anarchy A, with the horizontal line in the A either extending past the circle or stopping at the circle’s perimeter. What the A stands for is obvious, while the O circling the A represents Order, from the dialectic that if civilization - in all its crises and contradictions - is falling further and further into chaos, then anarchy is order. This notorious, offensive symbol will infiltrate every attempt at coloring the world monotonous tones, and will show up in all corners of the globe, wherever capitalism has reared its ugly head. The symbol will multiply faster than it can be buffed; as long as there are anarchists, there will be hieroglyphs of their language sprinkled like subversive advertising, showing dissent exists, and that anarchists will not stay quiet, nor will they yell, not all the time, for the anarchist symbol comes off with an air of secrecy, where on secret occasions one has, on geographic space, whispered the sweet sentiment of the A, allowing it to linger for all to hear, where it can conjure up all the history of the anarchist struggle and carry it into the future. The issue I find to be at hand is a question of interpretation and intention, that is - how people interpret the symbol and how the anarchist’s intend for it to be interpreted.
I am an anarchist, but I no longer write A’s, for I feel the symbol has become too clichéd, too detached from its actual source and instead substituted with a misrepresented stereotype of anarchists as stupid delinquents or chaos starting violence lovers. It is the goal of the government to squelch the revolution by commodifying it, and thus disarming any potential for true action, because you cannot overthrow what you are a part of. I do not feel the A will help anarchists in their quest for legitimacy, but rather will become so debased and overused that it will turn into the same, meaningless political jargon, just as bad as the “support our troops” bumper sticker but only on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Many revolutionary lines, however truthful they may be, have become clichéd and thus very hard to wrestle free from the grip of widely accepted connotations. People are likely to shut off at lines like “Nike uses sweatshops” or “capitalism is organized crime” or “we are founded on genocide and slavery.” All these claims are true, yet they are not likely to change the minds of those who do not already agree, no more than “support our troops” would make an anarchist support the occupation of Iraq. It is because the phrases have been repeated enough, and commodified enough, to become part of a stale, extinct political language that no longer holds the power it once did. These are all claims people have heard before, echoing voices people are sick of hearing. Such banal clichés thus become nothing but preaching to the choir or fueling the opposition. Slogans chanted through bullhorns simplify the subtleties and complexities of language, reducing the very cause they try to embolden to little more than cheap, domesticated rhetoric.
Rather than attempt to reclaim these lost lines of the revolution, I say let them die, and instead turn to a new language, one of provocation and mystery - in this there is hope. “It is the goal of the artist to make the revolution more attractive.” Revolutionaries should live by this motto, casting their views in a surreal light that shakes the realities and perceptions of those who read it. Phrases of intrigue, phrases that hint at where they stand but leave you wandering for more are harder to commodify due to their resistance to be tied to any fixed point, and this lure of mystery serves to draw the reader to delve deeper into their head, which is now swimming with questions, whereas a declarative statement would only provide an answer and lead no further. The true goal should be a stimulus of questions. If a spray-painted series of words results in confusion, or shock, this means it is causing the reader to drift from their comfort zone of existing purely within a predictable environment, and this is a good thing. Confusion can be a result of abandoning a system of thought, and thus being forced to replace it with your own. The interest of the artist should be in undomesticating words and their concepts. It is in the interest of the artist of the revolution to focus on jamming communication with ecstatic, anti-communicative waves of words that can disrupt a clear exchange of ideas, like a verbal wrench thrown in the cultural machine.
The language itself, along with the ideas the language conveys, can be played with, should be played with, violently, and in such a way that strips bare the unacknowledged body of societal structures entangling us and stones it to death. The poetics of the revolution should never be docile; it should be aggressive, imaginative, and insatiable. The fight for revolution would be a shift on all fronts; social and lingual, and thus the focus of radical propaganda should not be on addressing the modes of capitalism, because this still forces the language to operate on the Other’s terms. The language of the revolution should defy existing structures with strange experimentation and abrupt shifts in realities, seeking to skew the frames of reference, implode conventional wisdom, and interrupt the narratives we are stuck in by creating an influx of speech that thinks in radical terms, that abandons a privatized language of domination, that forces us to step back and look at ourselves in frighteningly new ways that light our frozen bodies on fire, with every word being a hot coal spit out unfettered, feral tongues. What will result, once the beast has lied down to sleep, is a language that speaks to everyone, that is universal in its primordial nature buried in all souls. We will cast words like spells to resurrect this collective consciousness from the historical layers of industrialized conditioning that takes the means of production out of our hands and forces us to experience the world through nothing but alienation. We will erect a collective spine to stand tall enough to strangle however many necks need to be strangled, because when we are dying, the idea of killing no longer scares us.
History is a series of struggles between the oppressor and the oppressed. Anarchists are a brave group of souls willing to stand in the way of an invisible monster, and by no means is this issue the crux of their actions. I do not mean to trivialize the anarchist struggle by focusing on an issue that many do not take seriously, but as an amateur linguist and late-night tagger, I am fascinated by our symbolic world and how we create meaning from a representational standpoint. This is a small analysis on one of the myriad of ways anarchists attempt to publicly display their ideologies to the general public, and what I’m interested in is the reaction achieved from this commonly seen image, and the meaning derived from one seeing the first letter in the alphabet out of its traditional context. Ultimately, I feel the issue is a matter of solidarity or division. That is, does the symbolic A carry a positive or negative connotation to those who are not anarchists, does it serve to further polarize or unite the public? Is it simply about solidarity between anarchists, letting a punk see that she is not alone? Or is it an attempt to show the public that things do not have to be this way, that if you are not happy there are others who agree with you?
We’ve all been walking down an urbanized strip of city and seen it scrawled in a back alley-way, painted on a business’s wall or etched on a dumpster. The infamous, circled Anarchy A, with the horizontal line in the A either extending past the circle or stopping at the circle’s perimeter. What the A stands for is obvious, while the O circling the A represents Order, from the dialectic that if civilization - in all its crises and contradictions - is falling further and further into chaos, then anarchy is order. This notorious, offensive symbol will infiltrate every attempt at coloring the world monotonous tones, and will show up in all corners of the globe, wherever capitalism has reared its ugly head. The symbol will multiply faster than it can be buffed; as long as there are anarchists, there will be hieroglyphs of their language sprinkled like subversive advertising, showing dissent exists, and that anarchists will not stay quiet, nor will they yell, not all the time, for the anarchist symbol comes off with an air of secrecy, where on secret occasions one has, on geographic space, whispered the sweet sentiment of the A, allowing it to linger for all to hear, where it can conjure up all the history of the anarchist struggle and carry it into the future. The issue I find to be at hand is a question of interpretation and intention, that is - how people interpret the symbol and how the anarchist’s intend for it to be interpreted.
I am an anarchist, but I no longer write A’s, for I feel the symbol has become too clichéd, too detached from its actual source and instead substituted with a misrepresented stereotype of anarchists as stupid delinquents or chaos starting violence lovers. It is the goal of the government to squelch the revolution by commodifying it, and thus disarming any potential for true action, because you cannot overthrow what you are a part of. I do not feel the A will help anarchists in their quest for legitimacy, but rather will become so debased and overused that it will turn into the same, meaningless political jargon, just as bad as the “support our troops” bumper sticker but only on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Many revolutionary lines, however truthful they may be, have become clichéd and thus very hard to wrestle free from the grip of widely accepted connotations. People are likely to shut off at lines like “Nike uses sweatshops” or “capitalism is organized crime” or “we are founded on genocide and slavery.” All these claims are true, yet they are not likely to change the minds of those who do not already agree, no more than “support our troops” would make an anarchist support the occupation of Iraq. It is because the phrases have been repeated enough, and commodified enough, to become part of a stale, extinct political language that no longer holds the power it once did. These are all claims people have heard before, echoing voices people are sick of hearing. Such banal clichés thus become nothing but preaching to the choir or fueling the opposition. Slogans chanted through bullhorns simplify the subtleties and complexities of language, reducing the very cause they try to embolden to little more than cheap, domesticated rhetoric.
Rather than attempt to reclaim these lost lines of the revolution, I say let them die, and instead turn to a new language, one of provocation and mystery - in this there is hope. “It is the goal of the artist to make the revolution more attractive.” Revolutionaries should live by this motto, casting their views in a surreal light that shakes the realities and perceptions of those who read it. Phrases of intrigue, phrases that hint at where they stand but leave you wandering for more are harder to commodify due to their resistance to be tied to any fixed point, and this lure of mystery serves to draw the reader to delve deeper into their head, which is now swimming with questions, whereas a declarative statement would only provide an answer and lead no further. The true goal should be a stimulus of questions. If a spray-painted series of words results in confusion, or shock, this means it is causing the reader to drift from their comfort zone of existing purely within a predictable environment, and this is a good thing. Confusion can be a result of abandoning a system of thought, and thus being forced to replace it with your own. The interest of the artist should be in undomesticating words and their concepts. It is in the interest of the artist of the revolution to focus on jamming communication with ecstatic, anti-communicative waves of words that can disrupt a clear exchange of ideas, like a verbal wrench thrown in the cultural machine.
The language itself, along with the ideas the language conveys, can be played with, should be played with, violently, and in such a way that strips bare the unacknowledged body of societal structures entangling us and stones it to death. The poetics of the revolution should never be docile; it should be aggressive, imaginative, and insatiable. The fight for revolution would be a shift on all fronts; social and lingual, and thus the focus of radical propaganda should not be on addressing the modes of capitalism, because this still forces the language to operate on the Other’s terms. The language of the revolution should defy existing structures with strange experimentation and abrupt shifts in realities, seeking to skew the frames of reference, implode conventional wisdom, and interrupt the narratives we are stuck in by creating an influx of speech that thinks in radical terms, that abandons a privatized language of domination, that forces us to step back and look at ourselves in frighteningly new ways that light our frozen bodies on fire, with every word being a hot coal spit out unfettered, feral tongues. What will result, once the beast has lied down to sleep, is a language that speaks to everyone, that is universal in its primordial nature buried in all souls. We will cast words like spells to resurrect this collective consciousness from the historical layers of industrialized conditioning that takes the means of production out of our hands and forces us to experience the world through nothing but alienation. We will erect a collective spine to stand tall enough to strangle however many necks need to be strangled, because when we are dying, the idea of killing no longer scares us.