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Note: This is (yet another) philosophical review, on the occasion of the Day After the 145th Anniversary of the Destruction of the Paris Commune. The authorities lined up and shot thousands of citizens. Rebels set the City of Lights on fire. It was quite a day. Kindly note that opinions reflected in this article are not my own, and as far as I know they do not reflect the views of any other members of the Socialist Freedom Party, except maybe a few extreme oddball members of its underground anarko-kinky-kooky wing with whom I may or may not have spent several wild intoxicated evenings. I really don't think it reflects the views of members of any other parties either. But who knows. And, frankly, who cares?


Big middle finger to all!
-- Phoenix Quinn, Cantankerous Old Windbag



On Being Anti-Social



Is there a gaming strategy of total refusal? A refusal to negotiate with pre-packaged e-society? A kinky-kooky negativity in the context of playing revolt that refuses to be anything other than a ferocious articulation of negativity?

In the swirl of critiques and feels emerging from considerations of an e-Republik of No Future, I was reminded of debates from a long time back which a few of us used to have within the SFP on the Nature of the Win.


A couple of the pieces I remember best from that storied era are:

First, the discussions between Frederick Engels, Osmany Ramon and Vincent Nolan regarding the possibilities for "A Democratic Form of Nodal Ramonist Commune Governance", as recorded, for example, in this Worker's Digest article: A Federation of Communes.

And second, my discovery of the Australian mathematician, Michael Eldred, and his impact on thinking about winning in e-Republik. Eldred characterizes capital as the totalization of valorizing processes, which ends up promoting an oblivion to Being. Or to put more simply: an obsession with winning always leads to an existential crisis. I reviewed this theory in: Called by the destiny of the win.


So, hier stehe ich, years later, still writing stupid articles about e-philosophy.
I am a hopeless case.

Today I am pondering what it would mean to just set the whole house on fire, discarding first politics, then discarding apolitics, and finally considering an embrace of explosive anti-politics.






Pure negativity can deliver a great sense of catharsis, not least by discarding all identitarian baggage. It means one no longer need to explain oneself. More essentially, it illustrates a key point about capital: Capital -- including e-capital -- is predicated on accumulating value -- any value -- in order to perpetuate its own self-reproduction.

There is no positive e-anarko-kinky-kookiness that isn't a site of e-society's reproduction. Community projects, welfare-sharing programs, independent media networks, an imaginative e-literature, friendly social spaces, contests and festivals -- these all help to form the material structure of e-civilization. Whatever difference they express becomes thoroughly re-made in e-capital's image: all value is extracted, all danger neutralized.

To our horror, anarko-kinky-kookiness becomes valorized as the avant-garde and even becomes, at times, the dynamic lifeblood of the social marketplace during this advanced age of an eRepublik in Decline.




Questions for a Rainy Monday:

But what if one was not interested in contributions to society, in carving out a ghetto within the material and symbolic structures of e-capitalist life?

Can an engagement with the Game be attuned exclusively to locating the moments which reveal the potential undoing of e-society, its default structures and relations?

Can a girl navigate the discourses and nightmares of mechanical game-normativity as it imagines the threat of a girl's anarko-kinky-kookiness?

If one is already damned, the why not ride that wave, repudiating the values of hard work and family, and throw in with the thieves, tricksters, hustlers, sinners, and deviants?




What...

If the machinery of control renders one's very existence illegal.
If one has already been criminalized and crucified.
If one already occupies the space of witches, whores, perverts and abominations.
If the culture renders one a criminal.


Then why not in turn commit ones e-life to e-crime?
Why not declare: You ain't seen nothing yet.




When I argue with myself it sounds like this:

Leftist notions of reform, progress, tolerance and social justice always crash up against the harsh reality that progressive developments tend, ultimately, to make the the systems of misery and exploitation more sophisticated. It renders a tolerance that means nothing and makes justice an impossibility.

Both liberal and revolutionary critics respond to such a critique with a demand that an alternative must be articulated. We liberals tend to do it with a sense of smug 'knowing' superiority. Us revolutionaries do it with a sense of angst that anticipates, but doesn't quite yet see, the existential abyss that is gaping open just beyond the edges of our ideology.

The Pure Negativity point of view has no alternatives on offer. The system seamlessly integrates all positive projects into itself. So the task-at-hand becomes infinite. It is all about dividing by zero, about discovering the count of the void.

In short, it becomes impossible to imagine an e-life worth playing except one of revolt.





A strategy of Pure Negativity departs from a purely psychoanalytic framework. The fundamental crisis of capitalist reproduction guarantees, just as so many of the messianic traditions predicted, that it will produce its own negation from within itself.

But let's strip away the romanticism of an inevitable revolt against banality and alienation. Let's also recognize that global cybernetic society devotes enormous resources to managing risks, catastrophes, contagions, events and upheavals.

Get real. That permanent and irreducible element which produces revolt is simply name😛 the death drive.


We all have it:

Chaos.
Anarko-kinky-kookiness.
Willful revolt.
The spirit of the commune.
Rupture.
The idea.
The wild.
Wildlings.
Oppositional defiance disorder.

These are names for what escapes our ability to describe it. It is the erratic sense of the need for negation which is intrinsic to all human societies. Any civilization will produce its own undoing.


Power creates and classifies antagonistic subjectivities so as to then annihilate subversive potential: gangsters, homosexuals, criminals, immigrants, welfare mothers, transsexuals, women, youth, terrorists, the black bloc, communists, extremists -- all of these antagonistic subjects must be managed, in eRep, in eUSA, as in real life, of which the Game is a (sad) reflection. Part of the machinery of Power is that the inherent fluidity of revolt must be seen to be, instead, sinisterly organized.


Movements for social peace fail to eliminate the death drive. There is no subject which can solely and perfectly contain the potential for revolt. The integration of each successive subject position into game-normative relations leads to the construction of the next Other to be disciplined or destroyed.



More Than a Feeling
"It's more than a feeling, when I hear that old song they used to play."


An utterly negative anarko-kinky-kookiness severs one from a simple understanding of ourselves. It disconnects one from formulaic and easily-represented notions of what one needs, what one desires, or what is to be done. It is a total refusal of attempts at symbolic integration of one's e-being into governing and market structures.

It declines liberal assurances that everything will turn out all right if one just has faith.

A non-identitarian, unrepresentable, unintelligible anarko-kinky-kooky revolt is purely negative, or it is not at all. The ceaseless forward motion of capital (and e-capital) and its states cannot be stopped using failed methods. Identity politics, platforms, organizations, subcultures, campaigns -- these all end up at the dead end of identity and representation.

Instead, one may experiment with the undying negativity of the death drive. It is dangerous to do so, but also joyous. It is more dangerous to do it in the real world, less so in the e-world. It is a persistent negation that offers assurance of nothing at all.

It is a constant and eruptive jouissance, which is to say, an enjoyment or pleasure, that is not tied to desire.

This feeling, this jouissance, is about finding a transgressive and excessive kind of pleasure, which is also a kind of suffering, because it is the kind of joy that is ineffable, bordering on mystical communion.



Jouissance




When one shatters both identity and the law, there is a supersession of the boundaries of pleasure and pain. Such distinctions are an inscription of the social order (in the case of eRep, of Admin and the oligarchisaurs) onto our bodies and our minds. It is the mundane and the miniscule pleasures produced through officialized power arrangements which keep players dependent on those arrangements for their well-being.

By abolishing both sides of this distinction, jouissance severs us from pain as a self-preservation instinct and from pleasure as society's alluring bribe. This process momentarily frees us from our fear of death (figuratively speaking, in the gaming context) which is such a powerful inhibitor.



A few possible examples of in-game jouissance could probably be found in those historic moments of anarko-kinky-kooky riot: overthrowing the top party, truly epic battles, infiltrating Admin privileges, pirating government funds, playing havoc with "democratic" dictatorships.



The driving elan of an anarko-kinky-kooky e-culture is divorced from any labels, parties, and identities. It is the desire for jouissance which sends players into the night seeking to disintegrate the corporeal limits of themselves, to truly flee from what and who one is "out there".

It is the essence of a criminality which cannot be reduced to any vulgar determinism.
It is the satisfaction of destruction.
It is the willingness to risk everything in sacrifice to some more grand chaos.
It is the excitement of a delicious bad faith.





This negative aspect of jouissance is what drives one away from obligations -- above all, any obligation to the Future of the Game. It it both the method and the goal by which one exposes the banality and horror of contemporary e-life.

To re-cast Eldred's Marxist mathematics in terms of the Joys of Pure Negativity: When all options are held hostage by the specter of reproductive futurism, then we are forced to identify the extension of our e-lives with the extension of the eRepublikan capitalist social order eternally.




Just Say No to Binary Choices

Not the defeated strategies of social democracy.
Nor the reactionary strategies of militarized privatization.
Nor the emerging politics of new encampments.
Neither concentration camps nor self-managed poverty.
Neither defensive survival nor ever-deferred utopia.
Not an event to come, nor an event to be deferred.
Not a revolutionary futurity.


A jouissance -- an enjoyment -- which shatters subjective enslavement to capitalist civilization harkens the necessity of insurrection against all that exists for a joy that we cannot name, an eruption of irreducible negativity.

This is an enjoyment fixed in the present without a care for the future.

The commune, in this context, is not a model for another elusive utopia. It is a process which intertwines diffuse moments of pleasure, pain and joyous attack.


It is kinky-kookiness gone wild, an uncivilized desire.