(no subject)
How are yinz?
Bunch of photos from the past couple of years
I'm leaving Pittsburgh in less than two weeks, spending the summer out of Reno and roaming the west coast and picking up a motor home.
... more on that later.
Our lives in the city are immersed in an ongoing war; outside the fringes of the metropolis (where they still exist), sorties of flight and capture. When bourgeois theorists speak to us in the futility and sterility proper to academicians of the "totality," of constructed subjectivities, of the disappearance of the outside, we smell the treachery on their breath. They weave tales of the inevitability of being defined by social forces instead of defining these forces ourselves (the reciprocal constitution of insurgent living). They try to bury the fact that we are the outside, or that the outside speaks and acts through us, and that every shattered window opens up a view into it, even if temporarily.
The outside never disappears, it is only continuously and violently suppressed. Pavement does not annul the forces of life beneath it as a final sentence, just as psychic repression of desire does not terminate passion or agency: Both function through a continual application of pressure that must be perpetually fortified, lest wilderness return in streets and soul. If power shifts and adapts, it's because we force it to. On this level, the same practices are at work in the modern high rise and the cul de sac, the suspension bridge and the damn, the housewife and the smack-pusher: 'Everywhere the hypothesis of the "I" is crumbling,' everywhere the foundations of identity crack. The veneer of normalcy is not a tombstone: It is a painstakingly upheld movement of war.
The only real issue is, and has always been, to carry destabilization of society and its entrenched power structures beyond the limit point of recuperation. This is not the end point, but the only place that can truly be considered a beginning: All beforehand is shifting under the weight of this burden. As a result, abstract questions interest me less and less, utopian hypotheses revealed as weapons of subterfuge and deferral: Questions about the function of any future society are the worries of a corpse (or the neuroses of a bureaucrat) and make light of the war at hand, its scope, history, and potential duration.
Like elements against the skycrapers, our struggle is that which moves towards generalized uncontrollability: It is where experimentation and the proliferation of life halt that forms the frontlines of the war. Permanent revolution is not "the revolution" of a week or year whereby the world of old goes up in a towering inferno with a utopia in its ashes. The long war only ends when the Earth has been gutted of all structures of exploitation, their practice interrupted, icons burned, and social context made to render them irrelevant; and all coercive practices deferred through the active play of lived imagination.
"Acting concretely upon the concrete" and all that.
Until we fight what has been thrust upon us, until we are free to live as anarchists, then our politics will be defined by this war.
