The Nerdiest Love Poem Ever

My Heart
has been broken
into so many pieces
                    so many times
by you
We will never run out of shards to gather
Even after the glaciers' melt disappears
the sand of the beach we spilled it in

And when all the stars of all the galaxies
have burnt out, gone nova
                       and collapsed all matter in the universe
to a singularity one micro-meter in diameter
a shining will exist
from a diffuse and scattered love
              in reflection
of those innumerable and enduringly vajra-edged
shards.

I wonder if then it can still be called mine
or if these new stars will gather in constellations
and if any remain to name them
will they be named after heroes and kings as stars are now
              or will a memory of their origin remain
                         to be named for their true purpose

Cargo Cults as Mimetic Altermodernity

Please contact me before citing or borrowing anything from this particular post so I can let you know how to cite it.

Revitalization movements, as they are termed by Anthony F. C. Wallace (1956), are characterized as a singular process of intentional culture change (Wallace 1956: 264). Melanesia, the area of the Pacific comprised of islands from Papua New Guinea to the Solomon islands to Fiji, is best known as the area of “cargo cults” a particular type of revitalization movement.

This post will explore Melanesian cargo cults from the perspective of Wallace’s theory and see if Wallace knew what he was talking about as well as examine the unique ideological political, religious, and ethical ideals of the movements, European colonial reactions to the movements, and the internal and external politics of various cargo cult movements throughout Melanesia.

Anthony Wallace subscribed to a very common theoretical attitude in anthropology that claimed culture was a conservative force and culture change happened slowly through the processes of “evolution, drift, diffusion, historical change, acculturation (Wallace 1956: 265). All of these processes are slow, unintentional and largely incapable of being influenced by individuals or even masses of people. This is why revitalization movements fascinated Wallace. He defined the revitalization movement as “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture (Wallace 1956:265).”

Wallace saw healthy societies as a sort “social organism” which should “preserve its own integrity by maintaining a minimally fluctuating, life-supporting matrix for its individual members, and will, under stress, take emergency measures to preserve the constancy of this matrix (Wallace 1956: 265).

Wallace’s theoretical background of viewing culture as a social organism and a system seeking homeostasis is very old in anthropology and not without a great deal of more contemporary criticism. To keep such criticisms short, yet make their point relevantly, Michael Taussig makes a wonderful introduction to, well, nearly everything important in contemporary anthropology in his book Mimesis and Alterity (1993) in his questioning of the theoretical doctrine of

“a social construction.” It seems to me that the question of the mimetic faculty tickles the heels of this upright posture and makes it interesting once again. With good reason postmodernism has relentlessly instructed us that reality is artifice yet, so it seems to me, not enough surprise has been expressed as to how we nevertheless get on with living, pretending – thanks to the mimetic faculty – that we live facts, not fictions… [I]n construction’s place – what? No more invention, or more invention? And if the latter, as is assuredly the case, why don’t we start inventing? Is it because at this the point the critic fumbles the pass and the “literary turn” in the social sciences and historical studies yields naught else but more meta-commentary in place of poesis, little by way of making new? (Taussig 1993: xv-xvii).

Cargo cults are nothing if they are not the mimetic performance of ritualized behavior – on the part of the colonized in reaction to the colonizer. Yet we can see that culture may not follow the steady states and homeostasis that Wallace wished it did and still account for the great creativity – ritually, ideologically, and politically that cargo cults have represented in Melanesia.

Let’s get on with Wallace for some more background. What the postmodernly inclined anthropologist would call normative cultural performance, Wallace sees as “a mental image of the society and its culture…. its behavioral regularities… This mental image I have called “the Mazeway” (Wallace 1956:266). This mazeway was exactly “what ‘revitalization movements’ revitalize” (Wallace 1956:266). Wallace is very concerned with the psychology of the revitalization movement, and we will see that so was the European colonial reaction as well. The point of a revitalization movement was to “make changes in the ‘real’ system in order to bring mazeway and ‘reality’ into congruence” (Wallace 1956:267). From here on Wallace has a neat little “Processual Structure” of movements that is sufficient for our purposes to describe as

1. Steady State; 2. Period of Individual Stress; 3. Period of Cultural Distortion; 4. Period of Revitalization (in which occur the functions of mazeway reformulation, communication, organization, adaptation, cultural transformation, and routinization), and finally, 5. New Steady State (Wallace 1956:268).

Wallace considered everything from the Vailala Madness to Buddhism to Bolshevism as indicative of this scheme. While there are huge differences between a religious movement and a political revolution, they share characteristics and often accompany one another. Perhaps Wallace’s fivefold scheme can be made less repetitive and more inclusive if looked at in contrast to the Russian anarchist revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin’s three conditions for popular revolution: “sheer hatred for the conditions in which the masses find themselves. The belief that change is a possible alternative, a clear vision of the society that has to be made to bring about human emancipation” (Bakunin 2007:4). In any case, any attempt to alter the social relations of any given society that is intentional will be “revolutionary.” Therefore, in a very broad sense, Wallace can account for the great diversity of social movements throughout time and space as of one processual structure. However, Wallace is too broad, vague, and relies on too old and outdated theoretical conception of the nature of culture to do justice to the particulars of Melanesian cargo cults.

The indigenous ideological aspects of cargo cults are difficult to summarize. Fieldwork amongst revitalization movements, especially ones that tend to be belligerent toward colonial authority, and whites in general, with cargo cults at the fore, is difficult to say the least of not outright dangerous if a white found themselves in the midst of the movement. Cargo cults and other related movements come about primarily because of power inequalities during cultural contact. In the face of this inevitably violent process the colonized, Indigenous peoples of Melanesia did not simply have their culture destroyed. Rather, as Long argues “one must seek the particular basis for the receptivity of the Western culture within the cultures in question” (Long 1974:406). Long argues that the return of ancestors or the deity, that is found in nearly every religion is “only intensified… [as an] original notion of return and renewal… the renewal was localized within the tribal unit and was interpreted in cosmic rather than historical terms” (1974: 406). Yet this return and renewal that the arrival of the Europeans makes possible is not unproblematic. For the Europeans come bearing the cargo of the other world, but the Melanesian does not know that while the Europeans’ ability to command the fleets of cargo is not supernatural, it is an act of magic – the magic of the creation of “a money economy and a work ethic” taking “the place of trade and barter. The intimacy of relationships embodied in the cultural tradition is undercut by the necessity for productivity” (Long 1974:406). This is Marx’s commodity fetishism, the replacement of social relationships with money, the commodity as a stand in for the production process. But what the Melanesian expects to be produced and the European expects to be produced are radically divergent – the Melanesian seeks a social relation of general equality to the white, the white seeks another worker, a wider market, another thing to sell. So here is the magic of the Europeans – not supernatural power, but productive power, dominating power. A nationalist state society expanding into economic empire: “Like money, the state is thick with soulstuff” (Taussig 1997: 137).

If Europeans have the magic of the commodity, surely it is self evident that the concomitant power of the Melanesians’ will be cargo. Melanesians’ must “undertake the mythicization of history… [as] the old myth has been ruptured by the new power. The cultists now undertake the creation of a new cultural myth that will enable them to make sense of the mythic past and the historical present in mythical terms” (Long 1974: 407).

Stephen argues this is done through the “special imaginative mode as ‘autonomous imagination’… [knowledge from] dreams, trance, and possession not merely effected truths but also the source of genuine creativity emerging from a distinctive mode of imaginary thought” (Stephen 1997:337). So when the “Vailala Madness” occurred in Papua New Guinea in 1941 after

A teenage girl in East Mekeo village of Inawaia was instructed by God in dreams that her people had been deceived by the white colonials officials and missionaries, and that the dead ancestors were about to return to drive them out. God also ordered her to preach his message that villagers must bring out of hiding the relics of the dead and other highly dangerous objects used in sorcery and destructive magic and place them on open altars in villages to negate their lethal power. Once these dream revelations were made public, many people began to follow… (Stephen 1997: 333).

While that international bestselling book of fiction and fantasy known as the Bible is full of such bizarre incidences, and a European will swear all their loyalties upon such a book, such behavior, literally enacted must be a “madness.” Perhaps this is because to the European

Cargo cults are among the most exotic form of exotic beliefs…Perhaps in no other situation does the purely invented nature of religious belief and ritual stand out with such naked and disturbing force to offend the rational gaze of the Western observer (Stephen 1997: 335).

This colonial refusal to see the mimetic nature of the movements most likely arose from Western psychoanalytic discourses in which

Colonialism did not create the metaphors of madness and pathology but rather merely drew upon existing ideas concerning the nature of rationality, irrationality, conscious and unconscious, ego and id, and civilized thought and primitive drive already present in Western culture (Stephens 1997: 337).

Such attitude blinded Westerners, anthropologists included, from seeing the “total psychological change” of cult practitioners as “positive in facilitating individual and group adaptation to environmental, social and cultural change” (Stephens 1997: 335). The altered states of consciousness that the inspiration so many cargo cult leaders claim is revealed from are pathologized by Europeans.

What the colonizing Europeans could not understand was the desire “Melanesians feel that only if their society is transformed so that they are as wealthy in material goods as Europeans are will Europeans treat them as moral equals” (Errington 1974: 255). I believe this drive toward equality (to borrow another psychoanalytic term) is perhaps the most important in human nature. Very few things can be said about innate human biological nature: social in the extreme, innate ability to create and learn language, high degree of androgyny as opposed to extreme sexual dimorphism in many related species, this perhaps sums up what can be truly scientifically be verified about human beings. Yet the engine of history is the conflicts of the dominating versus the dominated. Everywhere humans suffer some inequality, whether it be economic, political, gendered, racial, or status based, at least an important minority will attempt to first free themselves through escape, and if that proves impossible, through revolt. It matters not that a minority is usually the vanguard, for freedom has never been dependent on the numbers who desire it, but on the desires of a number who fight for it. Cargo cults and the various revitalization movements and the more secular and modernly organized social movements of the 21^st Century attest to the endurance of the ideal of the radical equality of the family of humanity.

Well then, enough moralizing. The next important piece of information in my research found disparities between community autonomy, unity, and division as the result of the various types of organization and leadership assorted cargo cults have had in particular places at particular times.

The Kaun movement, from the Duke of York islands, is organized along traditional lines. “The leaders of the Kaun, with few exceptions, all conform to the traditional definition of a big man” (Errington 1974: 261). Just like the traditional feasts of big men, no central authority exists, rather each Kaun endeavor is “composed of separate enterprises focused around a piece of property… Each of these enterprises has its own bank book held in the names of several big men. None of these little clusters of big men ever ask each other what the status of a particular enterprise is” (Errington 1974: 261). The Kaun movement sought to raise the status of Melanesians’ in Europeans’ eyes as “Karavarans equate business with European life: to be European is to do business” (Errington 1974: 263). The Kaun is a more secular and pragmatic movement than many cargo cults, actually pooling money and buying resources communally, even if the accountability of the organization is lousy. Yet the Kaun shares the fascination of the commodity and the secrets of cargo like all similar movements:

Karavarans have absorbed the idea that cargo comes from a factory, that business is necessary to make money for the order of cargo. But the way in which this happens is mysterious to them and they believe that there are elusive secrets involved (Errington 1974: 264).

Because of this mysterious nature of the commodity, the Karavarans perform rituals of mimesis: “Karavarans feel that Europeans behave at all times in the orderly fashion which Karavarans can only achieve briefly and infrequently during periods of ritual” (Errington 1974: 264). If only Karavarans knew the violence behind the discipline of the European economy. We see magic operating here again, but the magic is concerned with cargo. The organization of the communities involved remains the same.

A more important transformation than ritual to cargo takes place in the Madang area of Papua New Guinea. What is commonly called the “Yali cult” after the name of its founder not only performing the magic of cargo but the greater magic of new social relationships cutting across village lines, a completely new phenomenon of politics and ritual. Since the cult is practiced only amongst a minority of any village, it has led to division in each village where practitioners live (Morauta 1972: 430). Morauta argues

that the best way of explaining who does and does not join the movement is to be found in terms of the growing social differentiation in the Area. In particular, I suggest that the decision to support Yali has most frequently
been made by those of lower economic status (1972: 430).

The Yali cult movement seems to take a form more akin to class based community organization in modern nation-states as opposed to the more explicitly anti-colonial sentiments such as the “Marching Rule” movement in the Solomons (Whiteman 1975) or “Maasina Rule” (Keesing 2002: 95- 100).

Unfortunately, Wallace is unable to account for such differentiation amongst these movements as his framework is too general, although it is an interesting place to begin discussion of social movements in “primitive societies.”

To conclude, we have outlined Anthony Wallace’s processural structure of revitalization movements, of which we focused particularly on Melanesian cargo cults. Wallace placed a great deal of emphasis on culture as a sort of social organism responsible for the health of its membership. This organic analogy of culture is too reifying for my tastes, especially when we see that conflict, and not homeostasis, is the norm of any given society. What should be of special interest is not why people revolt and initiate movements for equal status, but why a static cultural environment is tolerated at all!

Melanesians’ encounter the colonial power of Europeans most importantly in the form of cargo – that is commodities being shipped to colonies for sale and consumption. Not aware of the production processes of industrial capitalism, the Melanesians transfer magical powers onto European behavior as the key to their possession of cargo, likewise, the act of ritual mimesis may reveal the secrets of cargo to the native Melanesians. Europeans interpret this behavior in the light of modernist psychoanalytic theories – as mass hysteria and madness of the primitive mind. The European does not see that their culture is just as woven throughout with the magic of commodity fetishism, which drives them to colonialism in the first place. Europeans do not see the ecstatic trances and revelatory dreams of cult leaders as instances of “autonomous imagination” and are therefore all the less themselves for it as one of the most important means of obtaining knowledge by humankind has been through altered states of consciousness.

Finally we see that although all of these social movements share in common a desire for equal status, if not complete freedom from European rule, that locally leadership may take several forms. Leadership may be based on traditional big man systems of economic redistribution or on new organizations of charismatic leaders. Which type takes place is dependent on the cultural environment the movement takes place in.

The most important lesson to be learned from the cargo cult is not the consequences of inequalities resulting from colonialism, or the violent nature of cultural contact, but the magic of the cargo and the fetish of the commodity weave Melanesian and European culture together in mirror false images of each other. And it is through this looking glass that both cultures must go to finish the humanistic projects of both anthropology and the revitalization movements.

Works Citied:

Anarchist Federation

2007 Basic Bakunin. London. www.afed.org.uk

Errington, Frederick

1974 Indigenous ideas of order, time, and transition in a New Guinea cargo movement. American Ethnologist 1(2):255-267.

Keesing, Roger

2002 ‘Elota’s Story: The Life and Times of a Solomon Islands Big Man. Belmont CA: Wadsworth/Thomson custom publishing.

Long, Charles H.

1974 Cargo Cults as Cultural Historical Phenomena. American Academy of Religion 42(3)403-414.

Morauta, Louise

1972 The Politics of Cargo Cults in the Madang Area. Man 7(3)430-446.

Stephen, Michele

1997 Cargo Cults, Cultural Creativity, and Autonomous Imagination. Ethos 25(3):333- 358.

Taussig, Michael

1997 The Magic of the State. New York: Routledge.

Taussig, Michael

1993 Mimesis and Alterity. New York: Routledge.

Wallace, Anthony F. C.

1956 Revitalization Movements. American Anthropologist 58:264-280.

Whiteman, Darrell L.

1975 Marching Rule Reconsidered: An Ethnohistorical Evaluation. Ethnohistory 22(4): 345-366.

Maoism (a poem)

I want to spend the rest of my life carving Buddha statues in teek wood with faces of Mao Zedong.

I will sell them at flea markets, craft shows, art in the park, import stores.

I will make $17 million. I will buy happiness with that money.

No one will understand why I put Mao’s face on the Buddha

Some will thing it is liberal anti-communist propaganda

Others that I deify Mao

The liberals will say I am showing a tyrant to be a savior

Maoists will say I am making an orthodoxy of their liberation

Both will be right

Their liberation is a terrible orthodoxy and that tyrant will be their savior.

Converted a blog post into a zine

I converted the post Sci fi, Utopia, and the Radical Imagination into a zine. Check it out and distribute widely!scifirad

Pomo musings

Anthropology as a university profession has since the 1980s been hashing itself through a rather unproductive discourse on postmodernism and more positivist approaches to the social sciences. My experience is that except for a few, individualized cases, the pro-positivist camp is very rude, belligerent, and dishonest with the students they teach the evils of relativistic postmodernism to. Pro-positivist textbooks often carry all sorts of personal attacks against faculty at the author’s institution of employment Sidky’s text being the perfect example of such. That is not to say belligerent, arrogant postmodern anthropologists do not exist (I will not provide my favorite example as he is a notorious internet troll, but a hint — visit my links).

I will not rehash the debate, but do wish to give one concession to the pro-positivist crowd: a great deal of postmodernist writing in anthropology in nonsensical drivel. However, an equal amount of those who level this criticism are too set in a privileged mode of knowledge, or simply are not smart enough to wrap their brains around some of the more complex postmodernisms. This is especially the case with post-structuralism. I find post-structuralism to be the most useful subset of postmodernism. There are two reasons for this: It provides tools not only of deconstruction, but emphasizes prefigurative political, lifestyle, and discursive experimentation that the moribund apoliticized mainstream postmodernisms lack (sorry you’re blog isn’t radical and if you grade your students you have not transcended colonial/modernist binaries). Furthermore post-structuralism has begun a dialogue with anarchism in the form of post-anarchism. However this dialogue has been rather one sided by academics and rather condescending — the aim of post-anarchism to bring the tools of post-structuralism to bear on classical anarchism to purge it of various vestiges of the essentialisms of the Modernist tradition in grew out of. This is a sort of colonizing by academics they need to become much more aware of. If the theorists of post-anarchism are to be honest to themselves, they need to realize they need anarchism and anarchists much more than anarchism or anarchists need them.

A is for anecdote… Recently my anthropology department held interviews for a new professor position. As a graduate student I was involved with the interview process from the periphery. During lunch with one of our candidates she said “You have to wear black to be a good postmodernist.” She was dressed in a black skirt, with black leggings, black leather boots, black blouse, and black shawl. Her hair was dyed jet black.

My response : “You know I end up defending postmodernism a lot, especially against that sort of stereotype, and I don’t like it because I consider myself much more radical than anything that is called postmodernist.” I glanced down at myself. I was wearing solid black chuck taylors, tight black jeans, and a black t-shirt.

The Number of Broken Windows Pales in Comparison to the Number of Broken Spells: Collective Representations of the Anarchist Direct Action Movement

An overly sympathetic introduction of self-elected actors

The image is one of an unoriginal apocalypse. The breakdown in law and order. A very real if unlikely threat to civilization. That is no doubt how most State agencies around the world react. It’s what happens in the sci fi action flick when the hero is too late to stop the otherworldly threat. Ordinary people get involved. They riot. One last acting out of the headless body politic in a foolish act of self destruction.

Yet in the real world. The one in which people cross borders to hopefully find a little work before deportation. The world in which cities swell as millenia old farming communities are dispossessed. A world in which the Eastern European, African, and Asian immigrants share a commonality with white middle class North Americans: An identified obstacle in the state and market to their desires. In this real world the riot is not the chaotic breakdown of the social order. It is much more a renegotiation of the boundaries of reality.

Perhaps, it is desperately wished, to the point of becoming reality, that something revolutionary might be accomplished in the moments of a scripted confrontation continually rewritten during the performance. The images activists use can be understood as embodied image acts. The propaganda machine used by anti-globalization activists can be understood as both examples of what Liza Bakewell calls “image acts” (1998) and Brenda Farnell describes as “an embodied account of categorization and cognition” (1996:311). The discursive practices of anti-globalization media revolve around an embodiment of image acts that are produced both as the product of activist discourse and practices of organization and resistance – a sort of ill defined dialectic. The discourse is further complicated as it interacts and contradicts embodied and discursive practices of mainstream media and the police, other actors that anti-globalization activists must be particularly cognizant of in the collective process of creating a representative set of images, discourse, and practices in a self-consciously collective setting.

Those who would like this state of affairs – the exception to the state of exception – the activists themselves, the autonomous media creators, would have us believe that such an apocalyptic clash is inevitable and grows directly out of an innate human desire for total freedom from domination. Indeed anarchy may be “as old as humanity… a longstanding tendency in the history of human thought” (Graeber and Grubacic: 2004). Such an approach is useful in as far as it allows for a distancing from naturalizations of domination so rampant in common sense and governmentality. Yet to understand the historical development of the Internet media phenomenon commonly called “riot porn” one must look for the specific historical rise of the “anti-globalization” movement of the late 20^th and early 21^st Century.

Something like this happened: Once upon a time, for better or for worse, the global Left, in spite of their major sectarian splits, where beholden to the existence of the Soviet Union in political, ethical, and practical concerns. Then the Soviet Union went away. The capitalists claimed the end of history – and it seemed to happen, the social-democratic left imploded along with the Soviets. The way was clear for the elite of the global core capitalist nation-states to “create a single unified global market, whose financial mechanisms could then operate through [the newly emerged] instantaneous electronic means” (Graeber 2009: xi). This financialization began before the collapse of the Soviet Union, but with the only concrete alternative out of the way, neoliberalism was able to move forward with its radical agenda. What really happened at the end of history in the 1990s was not a reason to celebrate for most of the poor in the world:

For anyone paying attention, of course, the reality was very different. Borders were not being effaced, but reinforced. Poor populations were still penned into their countries of origin (in which existing social benefits were being rapidly withdrawn) “Globalization” merely referred to the ability of finance capital to skip around as it wished and take advantage of that fact. Most of all, however, the period of “globalization” – or neoliberalism, as it came to be known just about everywhere except America – saw the creation of the first genuinely planetary bureaucratic system in human history (Graeber 2009: xi).

1994 seemed to be the year that resistance to this state of affairs began in earnest. The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico saw the first internationally publicized example of what was to become known as the “anti-globalization” movement. Already all the elements of the movement where in place: attacking the state in retaliation against market forces, the use of “nonviolent direct action… as a force for global revolution” (Graeber 2009: xiii), and the use of the Internet as the primary media of propaganda. What is perhaps improperly called the anti-globalization movement in North America took place between 1994 and 2003 with a high point in November of 1999 in Seattle (Graeber 2009: xiii-xvi). However social movements are processes of the contestation of existing and the creation of new social relations and never follow discrete historical outlines very closely. While anti-globalization proper as a movement may be gone, current protest currents worldwide obviously developed out of the anti-globalization movement and share perhaps the most important fuel – the factor that unites, explains, inspires, and makes militant direct action meaningful: “the movement of movements” (Graeber and Grubacic 2004): anarchism.

It goes by many names world wide: Autonomism, Zapatistas, alterglobalization, anti-capitalism (after anarchism this seems to be the preferred label in North America). The radical ideology and practice of anarchists constitutes a sort of “habitus of what here might be called ‘generic radicalism’” (Garcelon 2006: 73) Yet they all share several things in common: “decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model… [and] a rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means” (Graeber and Grubacic 2004). The last is the rational of direct action “a form of resistance which in its structure is meant to prefigure the genuinely free society one wishes to create” (Graeber 2007: 378). Prefigurative politics is the realm of creativity for the global movement against domination by capital and is the means of the activists’ propaganda machine is produced.

Collective Representation: Prefiguring Information Production

The practice of do-it-yourself media creation by anarchists and other anti-globalization activists has its core in two problems: The belief by activists that “the corporate media is essentially a venue for propaganda… TV networks being capitalism firms, it would be hopeless to believe they could ever be expected to correctly convey an anti-capitalist point of view” and as a result in any direct action situation the “media will systematically biased in favor of the police” (Graeber 2009: 439). The policing strategies surrounding direct action events are the second factor of what is important information for anti-capitalist media activists. The solution activists have developed relies on what Graeber calls Collective Representation as a “sense of collective production recurs on every level of representations and communication in the process of putting together and carrying out an action” (2009: 484).

The Internet can be seen “as a radically decentralized new media technology” that allows the dissemination of “repertoires of contention” by means of “mediums of collective agency” (Garcelon 2006: 55). Media owned by corporations tends to follow “sender-receiver models” (Garcelon 2006: 56) that structurally entails the centralization of all aspects of traditional media: state, editorial, and financial. The Internet offers an alternative “[p]eer-to-peer exchange – from the many, to the many” (Garcelon 2006: 57). Since the “Internet developed independently of corporate control” it does not pose problems of “information scarcity” (Garcelon 2006: 57) that corporate media presents.

Indymedia is the most sustained example of an anti-globalization inspired media undertaking for the most part performed by self-described anarchists (Garcelon 2006: 59). Indymedia began as a website news service in November of 1999 in Seattle to facilitate communication between the activists and protesters at the World Trade Organization ministerial (Garcelon 2006: 60). As of April 2003 there were 111 Indymedia sites operating in more than 43 countries (Garcelon 2006: 60). The explosion of Indymedia is directly related to the need of anti-capitalists around the world to disseminate information in a manner congruent to their ethical ideals of prefigurative direct action. Garcelon, throughout his paper, shows an annoyed exasperation at the ethical commitments anarchists make, none the less is able to gleam some important aspects of the Indymedia phenomenon: Most sites are run by young adults, tend to grow directly out of coordination of anti-globalization protests, a counter-cultural milieu and the self-professed anarchism of the participants (2006: 70-71). Indymedia acts largely as “potential common ground between groups rooted in…divergent” (Garcelon 2006: 65) centers of activism that allows the “diversity of views about social movements and grassroots organizing” (Garcelon 2006: 63) by the very participants themselves.

Joshua Atkinson as analyzed narratives of anarchist groups in the United States using “alternative media” which he defines as “any media that are produced by noncommercial sources and attempt to transform existing social roles and routines by critiquing and challenging power structures” (2006: 252). Atkinson uses a qualitative media analysis to “identify the constitutive elements of cultural values and identity” (2006: 252) in order to glean what anarchists are trying to accomplish with their propaganda. Atkinson’s study focused on printed media (the zine is a media form meant for print but is often distributed electronically) but is useful to any examination of anarchist media projects.

Atkinson sees the “overarching resistance narrative” as inter-textual with “multiple ‘fragments’ rather than existing as a completed whole” (2006: 253). From within this inter-textual collection of fragments

narrative fragments – constrain reality through constitutive function or a function of ‘ideological rhetorical force’. First, the constitutive function of cultural value explains the storyteller’s culture in terms of traditions, beliefs, institutions, and language to outside audiences, while shaping the language within the culture in terms of values, motives, and desires. The storyteller attempts to create a dichotomy of ‘us against them’ by outlining the values embraced by the culture as pure and the contradictory nature of values held by opponents as harmful (Atkinson 2006: 254).

This description is rather facile and could easily be objected to on such grounds, but when “the problems that face the anarchist propagandist” when

[t]he ideas he is putting forward are so much at variance with ordinary political assumptions, and the solutions he offers are so remote, there is such a gap between what is, and what, according to the anarchist, might be, that his audience cannot take him seriously (Ward 1973: 9)

it is easy to see why anarchist propaganda might take the spectacular bent it does. The potentials for what Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz calls “aberrant coding” the tendency for a semiotic code to be misinterpreted (1993:68) are disproportionately high. Aberrant coding is no doubt a feature of all semiotic codes; however, a discourse so remotely to the hegemonic common sense of political discourse in North America runs a much greater chance of systemic aberrant coding.

The largely Internet based propaganda machine of anarchists is often created by “organic intellectuals who are responsible for a creating a consciousness about the nature of domination in society” (Atkinson 2006: 255). The anarchist organic intellectual must generally provide “depictions of anarchist cultural values as well as depictions of anarchist identity” so that in “instances in which opposing identities where depicted” that “tales of anarchist actions and exploits were relayed creating a ‘unity of experience and action’” (Atkinson 2006: 260).

Atkinson found the following fragments of narrative continually resurfacing: “cultural values of egalitarianism and suspicion of authority” as well as “community and political action-oriented identities”, “the cultural value of solidarity”, and “a cultural value of sexual egalitarianism” (2006: 265).

The Continuing Insurrection: Anarchist Culture and Theory

Anarchists have always seemed to suffer a “criminalization and pathological representation” (Cross 2003). This is largely a result of media institutions and police openly hostile to anarchism and anarchists if not the exercise of free speech and political activism generally. Another example of aberrant coding. Yet anarchists do in fact break windows of corporate stores, torch police vehicles, blockade the road, rush lines of riot police, and rarely back down from (the cheering section anyway) a riot. Furthermore anarchists love to make propaganda videos, distributed over the Internet, using images of such confrontations – usually footage collected by Indymedia activists.

‘It’s the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine” is a more or less weekly Internet broadcast news and entertainment program targeted at anarchist audiences. The website http://submedia.tv/stimulator features Franklin Lopez as the 5t1mu7@t0r or the stimulator. The show is a combination of stolen network news footage, interviews with activists, and a bricolage of footage from militant protests and riots around the world. (See figures 1-3)

What possible rational reason could anarchists have in presenting such images to the public of themselves? If anything anarchists want to be publicly seen as being a progressive and constructive movement of experimentation with non-alienating and non-dominating ways of being. Where does property destruction and the riot (generally reported as being synonymous by outsiders) fit into this? These activities generally fall more under what Cross calls the “embodied… practical refusal of hierarchies, and the physical assertion of the freedom of the individual” (2003). The embodied refusal is comprehensible as what Liza Bakewell terms “image acts” (1998). Images are “an authentic, original document , a presentation rather than a re-presentation” such that “images have more to their mission than the description of an alleged authenticity that is external to them but are themselves veritable actions” (1998:22). Anarchists do not create riot porn in an attempt to transform apathetic masses into activists. It is as Brenda Farnell calls for “an embodied account of categorization and cognition” (1996:311) such that “a theory of images ought to form part of a theory of action” (Bakewell 1998:22) in that anarchists and anthropologists would find an amendable theory of value in the construction of radical political subjectivities. Riot porn is not so much a call to action but a “semiotic practice… that utilize body movement” (Farnell 1996:314) as it is not so much that “a mental arena in which images or rules exist prior to our acts” so much as a challenge presented to create a “new definition of human agency that transcends the terms of the old dualisms” (Farnell 1996:314).

To be fair to the whole of the anti-globalization movement and to anarchists specifically, it should be noted that anarchism has a diversity akin to any moralistic or ethical social project (its not unlike Protestant Christianity in this respect or an academic department in a university). Graeber and Grubacic claim that “[a]narchists are distinguished by what the do, and how they organize” (2004). They outline a basic grouping: “Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Coorperativists, Councilists, Individualists, and so on” (2004). These categories are vaguely aligned with what Graeber and Grubacic call “new” and “old” anarchism . This division is largely based on generational differences within activist communities. “Old” anarchists tend to attached to large internationally federated organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World and the North Eastern Federation of Anarchist-Communists which tend to be based on ideologies of class struggle and tend to be fiercely proud of their respective sectarian histories. “New” anarchists tend to be more fluid in their associations and focus on non-labor movement oriented issues (2004). The production of riot porn is firmly in the hands of activists that could be considered Insurrectionists – for whom the goal of anarchist organizing is to bring about militant direct action, property destruction, and confrontations with the police. No small amount of discourse accompanies insurrectionist tactics. Tiqqun, a French insurrectionist journal in Introduction to Civil War claims that

If certain theses such as “the war of each against each” are elevated to the level of governing principles, it is because they enable certain operations. So in this specific case we should ask: How can the “war of each against each” have begun before each person had been produced as each. And then we will see how the modern State presupposes the state of things that it produces; how it grounds the arbitrariness of its own demands in anthropology; how the “war of each against each” is instead the impoverished ethic of civil war imposed everywhere by the modern State under the name of the economic, which is nothing other than the universal reign of hostility (2010).

The insurrectionary anarchists are not the source of violence but rather are reacting against the State’s violence. It is the resistance to this violence that insurrectionary anarchists experiment with more egalitarian social relations by directly confronting the most objectionable form of domination: State and Capital. Johann Kaspar claims that what unites individual uprisings along insurrectionist lines is “a gap in the center of all these conflicts: the lack of demands” (2010: 5). To Kaspar the “demand is a contract, the guaranteed expiration date of one’s struggle, the conditions for its conclusions” (2010: 7). But anarchists in general, and insurrectionists in particular the goal of any reform oriented protest should be “the form as the demand to someone for something, and the content as rejecting anyone’s attempt to accommodate anything” (Kaspar 2010:16).

The insurrectionist discourse justifies the riot as the ultimate form of refusal of domination. Insurrectionism seems the more radical, the more nihilistic form of anarchism. In spite of this, or perhaps because, the definition of violence to insurrectionists is of vital importance. Graeber explains that

journalists have a fairly idiosyncratic definition of “violence”: something like “damages to persons of property not authorized by properly constituted authorities.” So if even one protester damages a Starbucks window, one can speak of “violent protests” but if police then proceed to attack everyone present with tazers, sticks, and plastic bullets, this cannot be described as violent (2007: 379-380).

This definition of violence should be outrageous to anyone who isn’t a sociopath. That it isn’t is further evidence to the anarchist of the need for militant direct action. Property destruction becomes appropriate as “an attempt to ‘break the spell,’ to divert and redefine. It is a direct assault upon the Spectacle” (Graeber 2007:381) with the effect that

When we smash a window, we aim to destroy the thin veneer of legitimacy that surrounds private property rights. At the same time, we exorcise that set of violent and destructive social relationships which has been imbued in almost everything around us. By “destroying” private property, we convert its limited exchange value into an expanded use value.
A storefront window becomes a vent to let some fresh air into the oppressive atmosphere of a retail outlet (at least until the police decide to tear-gas a nearby road blockade). A newspaper box becomes a tool for creating such vents or a small blockade for the reclamation of public space or an object to improve one’s vantage point by standing on it. A dumpster becomes an obstruction to a phalanx of rioting cops and a source of heat and light. A building facade hammer the same way again. The potential uses of an entire cityscape have increased a thousand-fold.
The number of broken windows pales in comparison to the number broken spells–spells cast by a corporate hegemony to lull us into forgetfulness of all the violence committed in the name of private property rights and of all the potential of a society without them. Broken windows can be boarded up (with yet more waste of our forests) and eventually replaced, but the shattering of assumptions will hopefully persist for some time to come (Graeber 2007:381).

To hopefully not too poorly paraphrase 19^th Century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the destructive and the creative impulse in humankind are closely related and share a dialectical relationship.

As Bakewell emphasizes the action-oriented nature of images in advertising (1996:25) we are surrounded by the Spectacle that casts spells constantly. Yet Bakewell says with the proliferation of “scientific paradigms modeling its shape and the thick descriptions interpreting its contexts, the understanding of what (and how) our contemporary images mean and do continues to elude us” (1998:29). The fact of this probably has more to do with academics inability to realize the embodied context of knowledge production making a truly critical probe of the meaning of corporate property and its destruction by activists and the valorization of the images of such acts because the images are too contemporarily political.

Spectacular Encounters at the End of a World:

The Streets, Police, and Symbols of Things that Do Not Exist (Yet)

Some memories would be more vaguely remembered if they were not inscribed on the body. You tell the difference between a protester and a member of the community in a city with a summit protest by who wants to talk about the shit storm downtown. Odd how a police assault smells like a salad: the white foam of pepper spray swirling in an eye bath of water, vinegar and pepto bismol. A description is not the pounding heartbeats or the screams of mixed defiance, triumph, and terror. No amount of writing can convey the truth of a situation in which a police officer stops traffic on a busy street so you personally can cross it safely to only follow you into a park, push you to the ground, place his foot on the back of your neck – this is a fact communities of people of color brutalized by police know painfully well. No amount of description tells the truth.

The truth comes out in fragments. In the negotiation on the streets between activists, protesters, and the police. The summits of the IMF, WTO, G8 – the targets of direct action by anti-globalization activists of all stripes are “largely symbolic events” self-celebratory rituals, and networking occasions for some of the richest and most powerful people on earth” and thus the object of the protest is to “create a sense of siege” (Graeber 2007:387). This leads to the police to a problem of “how to justify [violence] against a movement that was overwhelmingly non-violent” (Graeber 2007:386). In response the police in the United States have “adopted a very self-conscious media strategy” (Graeber 2007:388) that revolves around “daily press conference with wild accusations” in which the corporate media “reproduce anything they said, and rarely consider it to merit a story if, afterwards, the claims turned out to be false” (Graeber 2007:388). The police imagination is full of urine filled Supersoakers, hunting slingshots, and the occasional murder of a police officer by protesters – all apocryphal – seemingly to psych up the police to carry out their duty (Graeber 1998:388-390).

The police actions at such events has nothing to do with keeping law and order as most would probably define it. If anything “Black Bloc anarchists [the classical property destruction tactical unit of the movement] might be said to be living a hidden aspect of the American dream” as if Hollywood is any indication “Americans seem to rather like the idea of property destruction” (Graeber 2007:394).

Indeed capitalism, the social system the anarchists are railing against, is in fact, according to Graeber a “potlatch society” “built around the spectacular destruction of consumer goods” (2007:394). If anything the property destruction operates within the logical of capitalism as “[i]t is a system that can only renew itself by cultivating a hidden pleasure at the prospect of its own destruction” (Graeber 2007:395). The problem the police as proxies of the State and Capitalism is not in the loss of private property and the profit available from such but in the possibility that by “inculcating a certain passion for or delight in smashing and destruction of property can very easily slip into a delight in the shattering of those structures of relation that make capitalism possible (Graeber 2007:395). The problem, from the perspective of the police seems to be a belief that a sort of “collective consumption” is in fact a “tacit attack on the principle of hierarchy” such that the “very existence of the police is tied to a political cosmology which sees such forms of collective consumption as inherently disorderly” (Graeber 2007:396).

Within any social conflict, communication and understanding must accompany any use of violence. Violence without the desire to negotiate is the surest route to genocidal, terroristic warfare. Yet in the rules of the game of the summit protest “each side acts as if it is playing a game whose rules it had worked out exclusively through its own internal processes, without any consultation with the other players” (Graeber 2007:397). To do otherwise would be for the police to negate their belief that as representatives of the state they have a moral monopoly on the use of violence. Obviously this is problematic when facing a social movement that fundamentally rejects that monopoly. The real political operation of the confrontation is “not the power to win a contest, but the power to define rules and stakes” (Graeber 2007:402-403). The real question of power for anarchists then is to “regularly try to do is to level a systematic and continual challenge to the right of the police, and the authorities in general, to define the situation” (Graeber 2007:407).

A context of constant negotiation between two groups that do not recognize the moral authority of each other must then be negotiated withing what Cross calls the “semiotic domain of knowledge” (Cross:2003). In a semiotic domain of knowledge the black dress and bandannas used as masks by Black Bloc activists is not only to protect against police surveillance (Cross:2003) but an appropriation by protesters of the garb of the black clad riot police. Black dress in the situation is simultaneously a symbol of the State’s sovereignty and the anarchists’ rejection of that sovereignty.

Conclusion

Marxism makes its contribution to social science in the academy in a largely sociological way. It is accepted as legitimate sociology within the academy. Anarchism is more self-consciously anthropological. However anarchism is very unlikely to become an acceptable academic tradition like other social movements have accomplished – it is too radical, too political, too willing to give no as an answer.

This hardly matters as anarchists have developed their own means of collective representation. Indymedia and other Internet based media initiatives allow for control of content by participants in contrast to any effort to be mediated by corporate media or academic discourse. Prefigurative political practices allow not only self-identified anarchists a means of propaganda, but an entire social movement a means of create images through action. The practice, more than any particular image, is what carries the ultimate meaning for the participants – all semiotic meaning is ultimately dependent on the process of its creation.

The choice of using the images of semi-violent confrontations with police is not out of adolescent desires to rebel or an attempt to mobilize such rebellious desires. Rather, the image is an embodiment of a practice of building a power of definitions in contrast to the hegemonic. This leads to a constant unacknowledged negotiation with the police at protest events. The police themselves react in a similar way, of attempting to remove the power to define the nature of the situation from the public sphere.

As much as it may seem the events and activities described in this paper are out of the ordinary – the reality of anarchist activism is it is moving away from a “summit hopping” strategy and becoming much more generalized. Anarchists do not simply riot and take pictures of themselves doing it. The degree of organization that accompanies any summit protest is astounding. This organizing does not respect borders, ethnicity, or really any institution of separation. The images of riot porn are only showing the surface of a complicated process – symptomatic of the riot as tactic, the riot symptomatic of deep deep social dissatisfaction and an attempt to ameliorate the situation – however fleeting.

Seemingly, the resulting discourse could be cynically interpreted as a form of desperation – if not in the form of the riot as a protest tactic, then in the diversity and decentralization of the plethora of images and explanations accessible to the public. Maybe anarchists would have more respect, more sympathy, and more power if a united statement was presented. Contradiction can bread confusion which is very clear in the interaction between the police and activist discourses. But to the anarchists and other media activists to present a final product, for consumption by a public along the lines of mainstream media practices would be to reproduce the very social relations they fight against in their media practices. Presenting a finished product, polished and with a label of identity without making visible the social relations and the process of creation behind them is simply commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is the precise target of property destruction. The dishonesty of commodity fetishism is the most enduring and important obfuscating hegemonic discourse anarchists fight against. To not present the contradictions, not not make the process of construction visible would be to loose all hope in the embodied practice of prefigurative political activism. As a result, there is no end product for consumption. Fragments emerge instead. Poetic in the extreme; nihilism and optimism, abstract theories of subjectivities and concrete descriptions of material conditions, concomitant moralism and determinism. The importance lies not only in theoretical or strategic discourses – the beauty comes from the flourish of a discourse willing to negate itself in constant acts of revolutionary regeneration. Maintaining the imperatives of prefigurative practice requires that anarchist discourse, whether textual or as image acts, will always be a form of embodied knowledge.

Figure 1. A “Black Bloc” retreats from a police car they have lit on fire.

Source: http://submedia.tv/stimulator/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/header.jpg

Figure 2. A young person confronts a riot cop in a line of riot police.

Source: http://submedia.tv/stimulator/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/youthVriotcop-300×63.jpg

Figure 3. A protester points a water squirt gun at a riot cop.

Source: http://submedia.tv/stimulator/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/protester-threatens-polic-001-300×180.jpg

Works Citied

Atkinson, Joshua

2006. Analyzing Resistance Narratives at the North American Anarchist Gathering: A Method for Analyzing Social Justice Alternative Media. Journal of Communication Inquiry 30(250):251- 272.

Bakewell, Liza

1998 Image Acts. American Anthropologist 100(1):22-32.

Cross, Jamie J.

2003 Anthropology and the Anarchists: Culture, Power, and Practice in Militant Anti- Capitalist Protests. Theomai 1(7): not paginated.

Farnell, Brenda

1996 Metaphors We Move By. Visual Anthropology 8:311-335

Garcelon, Marc

2006 The ‘Indymedia’ Experiment: The Internet as Movement Facilitator Against Institutional Control. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 12(55):55-82.

Graeber, David and Andrej Grubacic

2004 Anarchism: Or The Revolutionary Movement of the 21^st Century. Irving: Irving Infoshop. http://irvineinfoshop.wordpress.com

Graeber, David

2007 Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire. Oakland: AK Press.

Graeber, David

2009 Direct Action: An Ethnography. Oakland: AK Press.

Kaspar, Johann

2010 We Demand Nothing. The Institute For Experimental Freedom.

Leeds-Hurwitz, Wendy

1993 Semiotics and Communication: Signs, Codes, Cultures. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Tiqqun

2010 Introduction to Civil War. Los Angeles: semiotext(e).

Ward, Colin

1973 Anarchy In Action. London: Freedom Press.

Pathologies of Power

Book Review

Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor
By Paul Farmer
University of California Press, 2005

Paul Farmer is one of the simply most devastating writers I have ever read. His ethical vision is truly international and class conscious. He is an anthropologist and a doctor and this book follows the work of his NGO Partners in Health.
Farmer opens the book with a damning statement about the current state of NGO controlled human rights work: “‘human rights’ has increasingly become the specialized language of a selected professional cadre…Far from being a badge of honor, human rights activism is … increasingly a certificate of privileged.”
This fact informs the entire book, focusing on the suffering of the poor in the Third World. His thesis is that “the struggle for social and economic rights [is] the neglected stepchild of the human rights movement. Because social and economic rights include the right to health care, housing, clean water, and education, they are sometimes called ‘the rights of the poor.’” The lack of, or deliberate violation of these rights “are not accidents; they are not random in distribution or effect.”

This is not a feel good, save the world through commodity fetishism book. Nor is it a rant against the ignorance of the backward third worlders who would have better health if only they stopped believing in conspiracy theories. Farmer in fact explores the conspiracy theory as a type of folk discourse on power and finds just as much if not more irrationality in Western biomedicine as in the poor nations of the world.

This book should be read by all medical workers (or those aspiring) and NGO workers (or those aspiring).

Five out of Five syndicalist stars

Nationalism and Culture

Rudolf Rocker, anti-Fascist, anarcho-syndicalist, and a great historian of anarcho-syndicalism, his classic examination of the State’s effects on culture. I haven’t read all of it yet, and some of it is problematic from a contemporary anthropological perspective. Regardless of flaws, it is one of the primary inspirations for my anarchology project and this blog.

Reading club anyone?

Nationalismandculturerocker

Sci Fi, Utopia, and the Radical Imagination

Science Fiction has become synonymous with movies with poorly written scripts and high special effects budgets. This is a long way from sci fi’s origins as a bizarre genre of literature akin to Westerns and Romance novels. That major Hollywood movies are now sci fi has been largely detrimental to the critical aspects of science fiction literature and to its usefulness in cultivating a radical political imagination.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is the 2009 movie Avatar. Released in 3D, it became the highest selling movie of all time. The visual effects are stunning and the urge to ride a pterodactyl after viewing is very strong. Yet Avatar is hardly more than a remixed Dances With Wolves; a watered down anti-colonization story in which a white male is still the hero after his remake into the indigenous other. Avatar’s story revolves around a typical teenage American romance; same gender roles, heteronormative and weirdly middle class. You get all this after traveling near the speed of light for six years to another solar system to conquer alien life. To James Cameron some stories are eternal – ignoring the bounds of time and space.

Avatar is based on a novel by Ben Bova titled The Winds of Altair. The first difference between The Winds of Altair and Avatar is the lack of the clear cut distinction between good and evil in Bova’s book. Rather than an evil corporation bent on mining some miracle mineral at all costs a group of young students is transported deep into space to terraform a planet that will be their new home. This process will kill all the indigenous life on the planet. The students take direct action, taking over the main laboratory on the space station, to stop the process. Only then do they learn that the Christian fundamentalist church that sent them into space will not return to rescue them if they fail to terraform the planet Altair. The story is one of environmental degradation versus meeting human needs. The balancing act the young astronauts must follow does not give the satisfaction of simplistic thinking or huge grossing ticket sales that Cameron’s rendition delivered.

Avatar is only one example of the dumbing down of sci fi that takes place. Sci fi once performed a role of providing a safe space for critical discourse that is now largely the territory of academic feminist writing. The academic versions of feminism pump out literature on many of the same subjects sci fi treats: gender, anti-capitalism, race, and the environment. The academic feminist literature is not necessarily less fantastical than sci fi treatments of the same subjects, just less circulated, less understood, and ultimately less inspirational of radical imagination.

The project of sci fi as an inspiration of radical political imagination is explored beautifully in Margret Killjoy’s new collection of interviews with anarchist fiction writers Mythmakers and Lawbreakers. The message of all the interviewed authors is that fiction, especially science fiction, is to expand the reader’s notion of what is within the realm of possibility.

Several such efforts of expanding the notion of the possible are evident in Ursala K. LeGuin’s novels The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. The Left Hand of Darkness takes place on a planet in perpetual winter where the indigenous human life is totally hermaphroditic. The result is the lack of gender as modern Americans understand it. LeGuin explores the social constructedness of gender through her story in an engaging way that truly bends the imagination. The Left Hand of Darkness shares affinity with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Yet LeGuin’s novel enjoys much greater understanding and wider readership than Butler’s, which is filled with academic jargon and lack of relate-ability to one’s own life.

LeGuin’s other novel The Dispossessed is the story of a scientist who is alienated from the anarchist society he lives in. He leaves his Utopian home planet to work as a wealthy government sponsored scientist on the nearby capitalist planet. On the capitalist planet the scientist becomes aware that his home he was previously disillusioned with is a truly better way of life and goes on to lead a revolution on the capitalist planet. LeGuin offered a way of viewing politics beyond the Cold War paradigm of Capitalism and Communism that was very welcome at the time and still has a great deal to offer the modern political imagination.

LeGuin shares this affinity with Philip Jose Farmer whose books posed the Cold War in the terms of a futuristic space race – with an important alternative of a political faction based on direct democracy and federation among the fascist capitalism and totalitarian communism of the competing blocs of nation-states.

Unfortunately LeGuin and Farmer are not characteristic of contemporary sci fi. Sci fi in the earliest 21st Century, a period of history in which so many of the technological fantasies of sci fi past are uncritically accepted as reality, that our popular conception of the future is based in dystopia rather than utopia. Rather than a better world to look forward to, worlds of freedom and material plenty we are subjected to a future of neoliberal capitalism across the galaxy. “The Corporation” is now the most important entity in contemporary sci fi. The Corporation facilitates interstellar travel, trade, and is often a stand in for the government of the future.

Examples abound: Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers glorifies a fascist future that has ended history in the ultimate stability of military government. While the recent Starship Troopers movies poke fun at this, Heinlein is a popular sci fi writer that passed off reactionary drivel as literature.

The post-apocalyptic sub-genre of sci fi is the most popular currently. Environmental disaster, the collapse of civilization, very often induced by a zombie infestation show a bleak unhopeful future of humankind. There seems to be some reason Hollywood wants the future to be shit and seems interested in denying human cooperation. The zombie sub-genre is a perfect example of this: a mass of unthinking, unemotional, undead humans threatens an ill affected group of reluctant allies who must brutally make their way from point a to point b. Is this an allegory for freeway traffic or immigration?

Science fiction could offer discourse on how to become human in more novel, free, and beautiful ways. It could inspire more diverse, involved, and radical politics. It could provide a  safe space for people to discuss radical perspectives around race, gender, and politics outside of academic settings. That it currently doesn’t is indicative of the state of the popular imagination: distopic, disillusioned, and depressed.

A is for August

This August anarchists are ratcheting up direct actions in their local communities as part of a “decentralized convergence.” The idea is to highlight the local projects that by and large constitute the majority of anarchist activity. The big Summit Mobilizations, the protests surrounding national political party conventions, G20 meetings, and IMF and WTO ministerial — while making for great spectacle as well as being sites of decisive victories of anarchist struggle, are often given all the fanfare and contribute the most to the publics’ perception and familiarity with anarchism.

This August highlight what anarchists and other radicals are up to in your town. Or better yet, organize something new — plant seeds that hopefully grow into long term projects. More info is available here Let me know what you plan! send me a comment, maybe I’ll devote some space to folks’ accounts of their actions here.

Some ideas off the top of my head:

Really Really Free Market: like a rummage sale, sans the sale. Just bring stuff you want to get rid of, take what you want — simple, easy to organize and fun!

Food Not Bombs: Cook vegetarian food with your friends and give it away!

Critical Mass: get as many bikes as you can with riders on the road! Ride in traffic and assert your right as human powered traffic. Whose streets?

Anti-oppression workshop: host an anti-racism speaker, talk about feminism from a soapbox, contact your local YWCA about workshops, better yet do it yourself – get educated, acknowledge your privilege and be an Allie!

Infoshop: print zines from zinelibrary.info and distribute for free. Make sure you get a few copies of my favorite. Write your own zine!

Let me know what you do! Tell me what ideas you come up with!

Most importantly get out and do something this August!