On Becoming a Muslim Anarchist
Dikirim pada 22-07-2005 oleh: Anarch[Oi]!
Tag: Arsip
Then one Friday, I arrived early for Jummah and encountered a small, elderly Indian man on the mosque steps whom I had never met or indeed noticed before. He gently mocked the Tablighi bro’ who was washing the steps, laughing as he explained how “these fundamentalists” were so ignorant. I could see the young Tablighi brother boiling with anger at this old man’s comments, but both principle and no doubt social sanction prevented him from expressing his belligerence openly. Deciding he had cleansed the mosque entrance to Allah’s satisfaction, he thus quickly departed and left me to the elder brother’s more illuminating company.
My elderly friend turned out to me something of a scholar, or at least so he told me. He had studied under some of the great scholars back in India, he said, but today there were few to compete with these formidable spirits. There was something about his lightness of being, and the glint in his eye, that made me think he was a devotee of Tassawuf. Then he did something which scared me half to death. He wrapped his arm tightly around the back of my neck, pulled my ear right up to his mouth, and whispered insistently:
“Listen to me! Whatever path you take, you must believe it with all your heart. It is no good to simply follow others, do you hear? Do what you think is true!”
I have tried to follow the old man’s words, but my worry has always been that I would fall into the vortex of self-worship, or devotion to huwā (whim), and thus commit the grave sin of shirk. Yet the more I tried to find something to follow that seemed true and right, the more transient and uncertain I found the belief system. Should I be Sunni or Shi’a? Should I be progressive or traditional? Should I be Salafi or Hanafi? I didn’t understand where I was going wrong. Then a phrase I read, or perhaps a passing thought, reminded me that, when I became a Muslim, I had cut myself off from my previous beliefs. I now realise that was a mistake, and almost certainly the cause of my aimless wondering.
Prior to my conversion, I had always considered myself an Anarchist – although one that believed in a spiritual reality. My anarchism was founded on a mistrust of all forms of coerced authority, however tacit, and like Emma Goldman, I believed that through education people can learn to live in peace and co-operate freely and equitably. I have seen power and authority abused in so many contexts over the years– in schools, special education, psychiatry, by Landlords, and of course by governments. And religious leaders. I am now convinced more than ever that power, above all else, is the evil that corrupts otherwise good and well meaning people through forcing them to compromise with what they know is wrong.
Thanks be to God, I now realise Anarchism is the hermeneutic through which I must approach and realise the truth. In Islam, the only submission that I can live by is that which is embraced with the spirit of freedom and with my heart full of joy. And so in the Name of Allah, I testify that there is no god but God and Muhammad (aws) is God’s prophet and messenger; and in seeking to establish a peaceful and loving relationship with The One through revelation, reason and God’s signs, I hereby refuse to compromise with any form of institutional power, be it judicial, religious, social, corporate or political, insha Allah.
Original article http://ihsan-net.blogspot.com/2005/06/on-becoming-muslim-anarchist.html
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‘Nothing is Forbidden, Everything is Permitted’
Hasan Bin Sabbah
Gnostic Heresy in Islam
The whisper in the ear is the direct initiation into gnosis (secret knowledge)in the Druze tradition and that of other Sufi sects.
And you may wish to read the Kasidah by Captain Sir Richard Burton.
Be thine own Deus: Make self free,
Liberal as the circling air:
Thy Thought to thee an Empire be;
Break every prisoning lock and bar:
“Stanzas from the Kasidah”
THE KASÎDAH
OF
HÂJÎ ABDÛ EL-YEZDÎ
by Sir Richard Burton
[1880]
This was written by Sir Richard Burton under the pseudonym of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî after his return from Mecca in 1854. Observant readers will note that the Kasîdah contains many references to 19th Century scientific and philosophical concepts, most notably the evolution of species. Nonetheless, it is a Sufi text to the core, and one of the few instances of Burton writing in the first person about his belief system, albeit under the cloak of pseudonymity. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a Kasidah is a classical Arabic or Persian panegyric, which must begin with a reference to a forsaken campground, followed by a lament, and a prayer to ones comrades to halt while the memory of the departed dwellers is invoked. The same rhyme has to run through the entire composition, not matter how long the poem is.
TO THE READER
THE Translator has ventured to entitle a “Lay of the Higher Law” the following composition, which aims at being in advance of its time; and he has not feared the danger of collision with such unpleasant forms as the “Higher Culture.” The principles which justify the name are as follows:–
The Author asserts that Happiness and Misery are equally divided and distributed in the world.
He makes Self-cultivation, with due regard to others, the sole and sufficient object of human life.
He suggests that the affections, the sympathies, and the “divine gift of Pity” are man’s highest enjoyments.
He advocates suspension of judgment, with a proper suspicion of “Facts, the idlest of superstitions.”
Finally, although destructive to appearance, he is essentially reconstructive.
For other details concerning the Poem and the Poet, the curious reader is referred to the end of the volume.
F. B.
VIENNA., Nov. 1880.
Paths to Becoming a Muslim Anarchist
Mohamed Jean Veneuse , Feb 03, 2007 @ 22:10 GMT
War of Dreams
slams & Anarchisms: War of Dreams
Mohamed Jean Veneuse 25 Jan 2007 17:15 GMT
Islams & Anarchisms: War of Dreams
War of Dreams: Becoming(s) of a Redeemed Circle A with an Eye and a Redeemed Eye with a Circle A
You will permit me for I am more than revolted…more than outraged…
For I
wanted fresh work
One that would make contact with certain
Organic points of life,
a work in which one feels one’s whole
illuminated as if by a miner’s cap-lamp
with vibrations…
But that is only possible if nothing in the spoken text
happens to shock,
happens to damage this desire for glory
And so this
Might infringe on taste, morals, good manners, honorable intentions
or furthermore that might exude boredom,
familiarity and routine
But
The duty of the writer, of the poet is not shut himself and/or
herself up like a coward in a text, a book, a magazine
from which he and/or she never comes out but on the contrary
to go into the world to jolt, to attack the mind of the
public, otherwise what use is he and/or she ?
And why was he and/or she born?
Thus
I had a vision of this in the afternoon…
There are some who eat too much, words…
Others whom never eat, words, at all,
and others…who can no longer eat words
without spitting; parts of themselves betray themselves…
Antonin Artaud & I
Pre-Preface
An Abode & The Three Witnesses
I am dead. Yes you are alive. I just narrated. I created a colloquium of seemingly two witnesses, a dialogue, something like Islams, whose witnesses, The Holy Koran and The Sunnah (Prophetic narrations) are supposedly the same but not the same; distanced yet more strikingly testifying to one another’s existence. Someone, a witness, the Sunnah, proclaims: “I am dead”. Another, The Holy Koran, dares reply, “Yes, you are alive” (Derrida, 1998: 96). Attente, there remains, demueurait, there is someone else, a third; a third witness. Patienter, I will return to this witness, lower and on the same page.
Some witnesses whom choose to testify to Islams, Muslims/Muslimas, claim or allege that The Sunnah or varying texts of The Sunnah is/are dead. Others, Muslims/Muslimas as well, have spoken distinguishing themselves, complaining that The Sunnah or varying texts of it, is/are both in the past time and through endless eternity, remain(s) alive. I am not interested here in becoming consumed with exactly the reasons behind such ‘talk’, such an allegiance, the lack of it or even an abidance to varying degrees of it, The Sunnah, or not. Why would I? Why should I, as some Muslims/Muslimas believe it to be necessary, desire to put to end to such variations, I ask? And for what purpose would an engagement in a discussion of such ‘talk’ carry in weight, importance, to the discussion here? I answer. Abstractly nothing, for such ‘talk’ to I here would merely signify a reflection, a testimony whose testimony testifies to the absence of attestation, a lack of consensus as to the Authenticity throughout Islams of The Sunnah. Nonetheless such talk attains to I a degree of pure testimony. There is a Pure Testimony namely to the triumphant spirit and fanatical jubilation of such differing testimonies. As for our ‘living’ witness, The Holy Koran, Islams repeat not the same verdict of it as those upon The Sunnah; The Holy Koran remains consensually Authentic; The Holy Koran protected by the third Witness-Author: “Verily We [God] ourselves have sent down this exhortation [The Holy Koran], and most surely will be its Guardian” (Koran, 15:10).
Associate then what I address and proclaim here, in this economy of a paper, to belong to and through The Holy Koran and interpretations longing and belonging to its verses as I put away The Sunnah without delay, obligations to it or talks of it here.
Around her: Between Our Vows of Abstinence & Transgression
When I address you, when I speak to you here, each time, twice, through two narratives it will be to make a point. You need not consent.
A transgressing narrative wrapped around and engaging with an idea signified as becomings, touches, divides, shares and co-appears with, yet is distanced from, an abstaining narrative, a body of thought addressing both Muslims and those Anarchists, Classical before becoming Post, lusting yet and still before essentialist identity politiks.
There isn’t exactly transgression here, coming across these two narratives, in this economy of paper, “if this term [transgression] designates the violation of a prohibition, and the crossing of an un-crossable limit, and penetration into a sacred space” (Derrida, 2005, 295). For rather what becomes, in the instances of my transgressions, and the violations accompanying such transgressions, is something ‘other’ that posits itself as a prohibition while ridiculing and breaking such a prohibition (Derrida, 2005: 295).
This economy of a paper henceforth here is of supposedly a sacred event that becomes transgressed upon, through another narrative, resulting instead in, not transgressive acts, but rather something else. You may refer to the ‘something else’ as sacrificial impurities. Sacrificial impurities, subject certainly not to a due apology from my part and I to You for such ‘transgressive’ acts. But rather sacrificial impurities subject to works of redemption that neither transgress nor preserve this supposed Mecca of a space.
As the end becomes the beginning becoming an End (Chapter Four), these heavy, twisted and morbid thoughts, just expressed, will touch You and You inevitably will feel embarrassed that, the touch, transgressed your body’s sacred space, brushed against it, without your knowing, without You noticing.
They’ve Made me an organism! They’ve wrongfully folded me! They’ve
Stolen my body!
I believe and testify that Islam betrays itself. It bears a signature without which it remains inaudible or weakly perceptible; a signature begetting permanent difference; interpretations where one is ahead of another, advancing upon another, towards one another, away from one another and such.
Islam is a memory of beatitude and in its memory I begin speaking of Islams or Islam(s), as I deem appropriate and will not neglect to tell You along the way why; never more Islam. Islams or Islam(s) then scurry like a vermin, grope like a blind person, or run like a lunatic: desert travelers and nomads (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 150). In other words, they are fixated upon a moving instant, as a Bedouin upon a camel, experiencing movement, but un-experienced in movement. ‘Islam’ has through an incessant process of renewal succeeded in taking the structured organized organism that is itself as an enemy, its undying desire belongs to its encounter with temples of interpretive difference; its organs; Islams. “The organs are not its enemies” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 158). What it has it in for “is the organism” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 158). Islam is a Body Without Organs (BWO) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 158). Islam if there is such an idea, such a thought, such a way of life, does not permit itself to experiment in peace, it won’t allow itself to ‘be’; Islam at war with Islams; with its own selves
I ask for your pardon for having things go on so long. Let You and I now go a little further…
Preface
Question of l’ Étranger
I am in mourning of all my tears. I am unable to participate in performing the rites of my mourning. I admit without self-delusion that speaking to God appears still an impossibility. A God whose absence remains for me, I am certain, forever unthinkable. Yet I am at a loss, unable to find public words for what is happening to us. I desire interrupting moments of my impossibility to break the silence of my absence from Nous. I desire to participate in the rites of my mourning. I am about to shift tone.
May I ask you something out of curiosity? Who do you think you are? When was the last time you became something else, someone else, real or not, I care not? Do you fantasize much? Are your senses becoming as my mourning institutionalized by mourning(s)? Do you confess to confusion now? You would like me to sit down and explain it all to you right now. Even had I much to say, you refuse to understand that I may not desire the heart for it today. Nonetheless you insist and persist in your demands. A menace you are. You desire a clarification and then a justification of what I am attempting, albeit failing miserably, at least in your opinion, in articulating eloquently and adequately to suite your comprehension thus far, in this economy of a paper.
I am now shifting tone. This is “Pigshit! All writing is Pigshit! No more masterpieces, no more masters (forget Hegel!)…Why? Because our innermost feelings are untranslatable and linguistically inexpressible”(Perez, 1990: 42). Would you like another reason? Proposed “literary masterpieces are established by repetition. That is to say, it is the repetition of reading and performance that establishes the Text as a fixed expression…So why repeat what has already been said as though one could recapture the freshness of the initial expression? An expression does not have the same value twice; does not live two lives” (Perez, 1990: 45). This paper, this scene of writing and its body of letters, words, sentences and phrases has but one life and is paralyzed by its own economy. Respectively, it is my intention that the specificities entailed in the discussion of this economy of a paper are to be expressed through writing once. For now and at this moment, sitting down, I tell you of a few matters.
As Antonin Artaud, I am insurrectionally in opposition to the rhetoric of written texts. A rhetoric soldered in repetitive asylums engaged in the betrayal of creativity and any possibilities of involution. Written texts whose bodies of paper have a bodily hold on you and I, confiscating our every sense and their every fantasy. Written texts whose failure in capturing the freshness of spontaneous expressions cuts across and violently replaces your non-coded gestures, as well as mine, with those “meaningless repetitions of the Text” (Perez, 1990: 46). I have to say this too swiftly but venture to maintain this firmly: “Texts [at best] are to be read or performed once and then burnt [including this one]” (Perez, 1990: 45).
Answer me you menace. In this economy of a paper you desire to subject me to your standards do you not? Why deny it? You desire, through this economy of a paper, that I come out of hiding, you desire to see of my depth upon the surface, so I may tell you something of myself and its depth. This is an economy of a paper that repetitively surges till it overspills with supplied citations of proposed ideas and their interrelated summarized complementary thoughts that are merely spent to accommodate all gaps in between the former and the latter. An economy of paper, whose exterior you supposedly desire if not vehemently demand to have bound in accordance to particular specifications in an attempt at pleasuring your satisfaction some more. What is it that you desire of me? Really what is it that you desire of me? You really desire that I take time, comfort you, showing you the equilibrium, “the truth”, somewhere along the way, here, as if in an attempt at convincing you that this maybe is what you are looking for? My apologies for disappointing you, if such were your expectations. I do not know what you are looking for in this economy of a paper. Find that somewhere else. Respectfully past this line your demands mean nothing. This is the hegemony of my economy of a paper. I did not come here to worship you. What did you think this is? And who do you think you are? Do not pretend to become a spectator in anticipation for a spectacle to commence. I am not getting ready to greet you, as this is not a theatre. Here, I do not “speak”. Here, lies the waking stench of the just recent deaths of both the spectator and the spectacle. As for practical ways of living, you find no answer to them here. Create your own. Take your next breath, engage me with your cordial gestures, dawn a smirk and even a smile. For a smile is an act of charity. In truth, do you think me naïve to your attempts at proving to me that you are sincere, courteous and not out to fetishicize my crucifiction? I owe you nothing. You owe me nothing. I neither own you nor am I bound to you, certainly not before death. I am not in search of your charity in you supposedly taking the time to read this. I point this to you. You offer an interrogative hospitality. You desire that I justify for you why I chose to write what it is I am about to write and why I believe in what I believe in. You offer an interrogative hospitality. You desire more. Wretchedly filled with greed you are. Yes I said. Greed. You ask why, as if somehow audaciously justifying an absurdity? You ask, why? You desire from me to justify why I choose to live the way I choose to live and not any other way, and more so perhaps why I choose not to live your way. I am not finished with you yet. You desire to interrogate and evaluate my existence upon your supposedly hearing of my justifiable reasoning(s). Reasoning(s) that lie within the purview and in accordance with your cordoned linear criteria(s) and preconceptions, criteria(s) and preconception(s) you have established as a priori(s).
You desire of me to, now that I am about to begin to surface and appear to you in what you believe to be all the spectrums of my subjectivity, devise a means to calculate the benefits of assimilating onto your stage, whatever that stage maybe. You desire me to engage in cheating myself and you desire to become a God. You drown in an abyss of arrogance. I owe you nothing. You pretend to desire in exploring where I come from and where I intend on migrating to. Who do you intend on mutilating here, me? You? The both of us, I say. In a wish and if I could fulfill a waking dream of making this page a theatrical scene for my voice and my body, I would respond to Artaud’s calling here for my replacement, the author-creator, with myself as director. Matters would be different. You would bear witness my unsympathetic wrath in response to your interrogative hospitality. A disorderly wrath, belonging to an intuitive theatre, for you to see without any hesitation, that “all creation comes from the stage, finds its expression and its origin in [speech] before words” (Perez, 1990: 36). My senses, fantasies and body would come alive in your midst and no longer become mourned. We would welcome my becoming as director and not an author/creator. A “director who has become a kind of manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies. And the material on which [I] work, the themes [I] bring to throbbing life are derived not from [me] but from” God (Perez, 1990: 36). I would be a shaman, not a Creator or hierarchal figure-but merely the mediator of magic. That said. Forget the theatre. You here have a factory and its economy in its stead. From now on you only know what I am about tell you, this is my hegemony, my resistance in response to your interrogative hospitality, unless you choose to engage in creativity for yourself. Create if you desire. Here there are no mediators between you and I. Here you have consciously greeted my threatening alienation in response to your desire to expose my paper and belittle the power of this factory; this economy of a paper. You may have your moment(s) of victory, but they are merely moments and a moment is never infinite though temporally at times it may seem to us as such. You come here as a psychologist imposter, and mind you so did I, though not to interrogate my factory, the factory that is my unconscious and the factory that is this economy of paper. You are mistaken. Here you cannot win. Why? For while we are both imposters you and I, you encounter here something else of me. I speak not of an encounter with me as a director. There is no encounter of that nature to speak of here. Need I remind you this is not a theatre? I speak of another encounter. Two factories: this economy of a paper and an “other”. The “other”, I mentioned above while you weren’t paying attention to the written words; the factory of me, my unconscious. It is a factory that carries meanings that neither you nor I can decipher or call to question as it is undiscovered and in response, it is to be feared. It threatens you constantly because it protects itself, without my consciousness of it. And like the economy of my paper it is always producing and reproducing, in between your pauses and mine, sounds and thoughts, between the gaps that filter all the unspoken words and all the forever non-coded gestures. The spectacle you thought would exist here does not. You may try and scrutinize what happens here, analyze it, diagnose it with all its symptoms, but it still stands, always has and always will, and is not in need of a second coming. Why? It is endless becoming(s).
Here, lies an ushering instead and the offering of an interpretation…
Introduction: The Rhizome, Processes of Becoming(s) and Faith
I think she moved away, still with the feeling of lightness
So begins in this economy of a paper neither an alliance nor a contract, neither a familiarity nor a fictional friendship but rather an abrupt collusion or in some sense none other than the arrival of an interpretation. I ‘speak’ here and now and at this instant say its character, the interpretation’s character, is signified as Islamic Anarchistic Becomings. I ‘speak’ of an interpretation whose essence is drawn from infinite separations of thoughts whose belongings testify to my conscious and unconscious factorial experiences themselves, here and now in this economy of a paper. Until…
She found herself in a distant forest, named Bois des Bruyères
Here, obviously, is where we, You and I, must have a debate. In Classical Anarchism’s insurrection against ‘the’ theological authority, God, You a former Classical Anarchist and now a self-proclaimed Post-Anarchist became, through mere processes of re-inscription, God’s replacement, a demagogue, a master and a new form of authority. You forgot and forget: In engaging in an un-statutory process, You claimed to have murdered God, but You left the actual place of the divine intact (Newman, 2001: 119). Your deliberate outbursts now proclaim Conventional Classical Anarchism(s) to have exhibited fragility. A fragility emanating from them laying hostage, You say, as they are linked and attached to and emerge from Euro-centric metaphysics. Euro-centric metaphysics whose conceptions and “concepts of human subjectivity and human rationality…are implicitly bourgeois and statist; it is [rightly noted, as You have,] therefore [that it is] extremely difficult, if not theoretically impossible, for such [Classical] Anarchism[s] to transcend the sociopolitical order” which they purported to challenge (Call, 2002: 33). You announced, created and invited Post-Anarchism as a substitute. More easily than such substitution, You utter that Post-Anarchism affirms the importance of difference. You deliberately bless yourself by complementing yourself on Post-Anarchism’s understanding of “the need to draw together different strands of radical thinking-anarchist, feminist, postcolonial, and so on- into provisional tactical alliances” (Call, 2002: 42-43). You lie. The ‘dead’ Classical Anarchism(s) still belong(s) to You and the ‘newly born’ Post-Anarchism is still deprived from offering hospitality, distancing itself and hence yourself yet from Religion. There is not and there must not be any inheritance or filiation from Classical Anarchism(s), worthy of your appellations upon Religions. Yes, You lied to ever yourself, never I. You are far beyond and without good reason engaged in your own praises under the rubric that Post-Anarchism is distinct from Classical Anarchism(s) as they bury Classical Anarchisms’ placed vision(s) of a return to an authentic human condition (Call, 2002: 42- 43). You sigh secretly that ‘the’ Post-modern Anarchist finds their dwelling place not in the past but rather in the future (Call, 2002: 42-43). You are yet, still trying to escape a selective past, performing a partial excavation, as fast as possible, rather than returning faithfully to the past in order to move forward; Sankofa. Your decree upon Religions ceases not. Religion(s) continue(s) to be exiled, deported, expelled and deprived from your excavation(s). Religion(s) always equated with the manipulative and parasitic. Hence, You resort to blackmail. Your blackmail wants still to keep “God [and God’s fettered religion]…nonexistent; their promises…still [perceived to be] null and void, since they can only be fulfilled by ‘man’s’ subordination” (Goldman, 1969: 5-7). Thus, your former Classical Anarchism(s) and your present and future Post-Anarchism remain(s) deprived and uncommitted to disarming “centuries of engrained Euro-centrism” that have yet to acquire and require overcoming(s) (Adams, 2003: 1). In principle it certainly seems that “the importance of [your] Anarchism[s] …[lies] in its exposing the authoritarianism[s] within [Classical] Marxism[s], and the unmasking of the place of power within the state” (Newman, 2001: 159). But in paying attention and combating another, Classical Marxism(s), it, Anarchism(s), and You neglected itself and yourself and You both became ‘blind’, consciously and unconsciously, to the “authoritarian tendencies” through your exclusion of ‘the non-Eurocentric other, Islam(s)’ (Newman, 2001: 159). Your “[Classical] Anarchism’s pure place of resistance against power, its uncontaminated point of departure…was [and remains yet with Post-Anarchism and You, un-strangely] somewhat impure, and contaminated with power” (Newman, 2001: 159). You mistake and confuse yourself to be taken for someone else, for something else unless you confront that Anarchism(s) [Classical and Post] and hence the “the identity of the anarchist subject [your identity] is actually constituted through its subordinated other- the power that it claims to eschew” over me (Newman, 2001: 119). You and “Anarchism(s) [, Classical and Post, ought to be]…forced to reflect on the authoritarian possibilities within [your] own discourses, and develop appropriate strategies of resistance” to your Micro-fascism(s) (Newman, 2001: 119). In contesting and disarming such authority, your authority, rather than submitting to its basic and limited jurisdiction, I engage in ‘super-seeing’; seeing in the ‘blind’ place of the ‘blind’ Anarchism(s) [Classical, Post] and the ‘blind’ You. Where…
She remained sheltered by trees she never knew well
Your avowed treatise on an absolute disarmament of your abstractions and your commitments to draw together different strands are respectively infinitely vulnerable.
You serve to classify heterogeneous religions under the same name. Your farce remains, it just changed sides; from Classical to Post and back again to Classical. You a Post-Anarchist have followed and still follow Classical Anarchism’s trajectory towards religion. You have yet to come to realize that in choosing such a re-inscription and the political representation that accompanies it that You have delegated “our” supposedly deceased God’s power to yourself. Respectively You run the risk of exploiting, if you have not do so already, and perpetuating that oppression [formerly a type of theological oppression, now a Post-Anarchistic oppression] onto other groups or individuals, I (May, 1994: 47).
“How [do You, a self-proclaimed Post-Anarchist] talk religion, talk Islam? Of religion, of Islams? Singularity of religion, singularity of Islams today? How dare [You] speak of [them] in the singular without fear and trembling, this very day? And so briefly and so quickly?” (Derrida, 1996: 1). Islams are not Islamism and You should not forget that the latter operates in the name of the former and thus emerges the grave question of the names of Islam(s). As for I, a mute witness, such names of Islam(s) emerge out of recognizing that “the ‘hyper-orthodox’ & the ulemocracy cannot…reduce it [Islam(s)] to a hegemonistic/universalistic ideology…to rule out divergent forms of ‘sacred politics’ informed by Sufism [e.g. the Naqshabandis], ‘radical’ Shia-ism [e.g. Ali Shariati], Ismailism, Islamic Humanism, Sunni-ism, the ‘Green Path’ of Col. Qadafi (part neo-Sufism, part anarcho-syndicalism)…the ‘cosmopolitan Islam of Bosnia…there is and will not be a single “monolith” of Islam” (Bey, 1996: 7). As for I, “The Qur’an by means of its pulverization of human language, is…Avant-garde…Post-modern…In its structure, its allusiveness, its ambiguities, its imagery, and its poetry” (Cheethan, 2005: 122). You know not Islams. As for I, “the Qurran reveals human language crushed by the power of the divine word; God’s word unmakes all human meanings, all the proud constructions of civilization, of high culture, and returns all the luxuriant cosmic, imagery back to the lowly and the oppressed, so that in their imaginations it can be made anew” (Cheethan, 2005: 122). Made anew through Ijtihad. As for I, Islam(s) offers me this Ijtihad, a kind of wandering in the vertigo of the past, present and future. As for I, Ijtihad translates to an Islamic right and duty to track, identify, intercept, pick up, translate, interpret and re-interpret Islamic principles and values to meet the social conditions of the past, present and future (Esposito, 2002: 159). As for I “the Islamic imagination, [as] Massignon has written, should be seen as a desperate regression back to the primitive, the eternal pagan substrate of all religions-that proteiform cubehouse, the Ka’ba- as well as to a primitive pre-Mosaic monotheism of Abraham… The Dome is built upon the Rock’” (Cheethan, 2005: 122). As for I, I hold “that, whatever our relation to religion may be, and to this or that religion, we are not priests bound by a ministry, nor theologians, nor qualified, competent representatives of religion…as such, in the sense the certain so called Enlightenment philosophers are thought to have been” and which You continue to strive to be (Derrida: 1996: 7). As for I, the world must be imaginalized, must be interpreted along with the soul. As for I, if the balance between the visible and invisible worlds and if the balance between the material and the spiritual is tragically lost, caught in an instant of death, creativity dies. As for I, religion is a spiritual bond, “a reflecting faith…[and] opposed to dogmatic faith…in so far as the latter claims to know and thereby ignores the difference between faith and knowledge” (Derrida, 1996: 10). As for I, I deny that “there is any a priori reality to the signifier: words, and specifically certain words, are nothing more than elements within an established semiotic field, and thus we repeat” (Perez, 1990: 116). As for I, “there is no universal structure of the mind, of relationships, of sexuality, etc. any more than there is an eternal essence of Woman-or Man. In the end we together say: we are becoming…Woman…Man…Animal…all.” (Perez, 1990: 119). Henceforth…
She was never bound to death by my surreptitious friendship
You have not come here to become friends. My friendship does not belong to your intention or your espoused ubiquitous and ambiguous ‘solidarity’. You, now a Post-Anarchist, have not come here to become friends and You have not given me infinitely respectful attention. Even if your friendship and attention came here, they are merely premised on the intention that we may hypothetically have the same enemies. You ask of my friendship? My friendship came here in the knowing that the differences between us would never leave anything else for us but friendship. My friendship further differs in that it is premised in infidelities that occurred prior to us trying to relate here, if that is at all a possibility. My infidelities, despite being each unique, were with other friends and strangers, whom I have met, not met and will never meet. Or do you think yourself my only friend? These friendships, my friendships, which forever lie in my possession were and are not premised on, as yours, an intent whose belonging is premised upon launched interrogations upon my factory; this economy of a paper. These friendships sought not to interrogate like You my factory here. How could they, for if they did they would no longer be my friendships? Rather they were and are premised on open theatres outside this economy of a paper. You desire to know open theatres? Listen to Antonin Artaud. It is where the written text is replaced with the body and the theater. After all is the theater not “the only place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice?” The theater is the only place where one can escape the violence of inscription which kills the human spirit” (Perez, 1990: 47). Thus my desire here, instead of an unattainable theatre, as a gift of my consciousness to You, becomes a belonging to Gilles Deleuze’s expression. Deleuze’s expression becomes that “You can always replace one word with another. If You don’t like that one, if it doesn’t suit You, take another and put another in its place…Let us create extraordinary words on condition that they be put to the most ordinary us and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object” (2001: 193).
I am going to listen to Deleuze. Now if I indulge in the luxury of replacing a word, a written word, with another, substitute it with another, layer it with another, can I replace You with another? What and who are You? Do you know? Unlike you I am not going to pretend to know. I informed You that my friendship here began with infidelity. What I propose to know about You becomes this though. You are a Post-Anarchist and a Muslim. You are both? Yes you. Why? You know neither. Even had You ascertained knowledge of both You forget that “any claim to a universal structure of the mind stems from the reactive desire to make life mathematical, calculable and simple, as in a story with a necessary beginning and a necessary end” (Perez, 1990: 112). However, relationships between human beings are a lot richer than that. “There are as many kinds of relationships as there are individuals.” (Perez, 1990:112). Henceforth if you seek not richness and its prose You do not belong here. And…
At the moment when the shooting was no longer, but to come…
Respectively and in response to your authority, expressed in many paragraphs above, I offer a resistance. This economy of a paper and its language(s) are a form of resistance that ought to be accounted for and in accordance with your analysis. This economy of a paper is my interception, an injunction of language. A language whose “essence is friendship and hospitality” (Derrida, 2000: 98) A language that “is political, and while it can participate in political domination, it can also be used as a tool against it”, against your jurisdiction(s) upon my religion(s), my faith(s), my Islam(s) (Newman, 2001: 106). “Your linguistics [of the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ by excluding Islam(s)] participates in authoritarian or state thought…practices of domination…by establishing a rational truth or essence…prevalent in thought, in images of thought…in words themselves” (Newman, 2001: 106). Respectively I resist here. Respectively I create here. Again I tell You, I perform Ijtihad. Do You require reminding? “Power creates its own resistance” (May, 2004: 73). Your liberation from your own self-subscribed authority, from your own Micro-fascism(s), and hence power must respectively take into account the kind of resistance that is being engaged in [here, in my economy of a paper], on pain of repeating that which You are trying to escape; Classical Conventional Anarchism(s) and your Post-Anarchistic authority (May, 2004: 73). And…
In the dense forest, suddenly, after how much time, she and I rediscovered a
Sense of the real
I tell You again I take it upon myself, here in this economy of a paper, to invoke and draw new contours of what You perceive as illicit and impossible; Islamic Anarchistic Becomings. Three nodes of congruence and, respectively, three plateaus or chapters are unveiled here. I speak of plateaus that unfold here all three reasoning(s) one might insist upon Anti-Capitalist Islamic Anarchistic Becomings, Anti-Authoritarian Islamic Anarchistic Becomings and Islamic Anarchistic Becomings of Nous. These plateaus of which I speak are particularly oriented and address remnants of Classical and Post-Anarchism’s merciless antagonism(s) against religion(s). Here, with instances of every plateau, I open and teach You of my Islam(s). The first two plateaus are nocturnal moments of movement, if You will, constituted of two sacred enemies we, You and I, are a versed to. Here I testify to Anti-Capitalist Islamic Anarchistic Becomings and acquire a gift for You along the way; I write you an alternative way of economically living through Islams.
The first enemy then, your enemy and my enemy, takes the form of fluid circular economism or monetarism; Eurocentric Capitalism (Chapter One). I unravel the lines of force shared between You and I that semantically traverse the idea of Anti-Capitalism and recreate such a signifier as an Islamic Anarchistic reply to Eurocentric Capitalism. A Eurocentric Capitalism whose strength resides in the fact that its axiomatic is never saturated (Perez, 1990: 56). A Eurocentric Capitalism whose capability belongs to its residual strength, in that it is always adding a new axiom to the previous ones as it appropriates whatever it finds to be a threat (Perez, 1990: 56). A Eurocentric Capitalism that always works and makes others work “by inscribing, coding and re-directing the flow of desire so that they may correspond with the flows of capital at the stock market” (Perez, 1990: 56). A Eurocentric Capitalism that seeks to establish an arborescent hierarchical structure, coding our every socious, our every relationship and our every desire into relationships and desires with a material essence, through processes of “de-territorialization (degrounding) and territorialization (grounding)” (Perez, 1990: 56). A Eurocentric Capitalism that makes repetition, a simulacrum, if You will, its end, such that every other someone or something is merely a copy of a copy, as this economy of a paper is to every other paper. I speak here of a Eurocentric Capitalism that desires the destruction of meanings by and through its insatiable appetite for repetitions. A Eurocentric Capitalism known for its creation of myths “to make people dependent on those myths…[to make] people feel that they lack, and of course, desire something” (Perez, 1990: 113). A Eurocentric Capitalism engaged in promoting its culture that basks in the greed and egoism of money and profits to eclipse and render idolatrous more authentic concerns, namely, ‘us’ and everything else on earth (Call, 2003: 46). I speak here of a Eurocentric Capitalism that Islams harmoniously beside Post-Anarchism believes is a cause and not an effect, not a disease but rather a symptom (Call, 2003: 127).
The second enemy represents itself primarily through worldwide pedagogical aerial juridical orders; Eurocentric Authority (Chapter Two). Here I testify to Anti-Authoritarian Islamic Anarchistic Becomings. Here I testify in truth to the truth and for truth, as Islams are not only capable of, but rather they do in fact espouse Anti-Authoritarian testimonies going hand in hand with Post-Anarchism and their despising of Eurocentric and Non-Eurocentric Authority. A Eurocentric and Non-Eurocentric Authority whose essence is abstractly simply authority and that takes Tactical forms, hence is micro-political and Micro-fascist, like You paragraphs upon paragraphs above, as well as Strategic forms, hence the macro-political is Macro-fascist like the Eurocentric-ally conceived State. I speak of a Micro-political authority whose power finds its site in the “observation that power does not operate, as many people believe from the top down” (Call, 2003, 66). It is a power whose form is “capillary: it is everywhere, it flows through every social relation” (Call, 2003: 66). I speak here of a Micro-political power whose means and presence is in everyone and everything and not solely constrained, confined, or shackled to oppressors but those who suffer under oppressions as well (Call, 2003: 66) I speak of a Micro-political power that passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the hands of the masters. I speak here of a Micro-political power that is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another (Call, 2003: 66). I speak of a Micro-political power that is intimate and is divulged in private like secret events. I speak of a Micro-political power that is within You and within I. I speak here of a Micro-political power that I use here and now in resistance to You, as your eyes foreshadow my text, trying to catch up merely with some of the resistances contained through it. Resistances amplified in my every word, the spaces in between what is said and unsaid and which represent an infinite collection of spontaneous, calculated and uncalculated micro-revolts that are savage, rampant, violent and center-less, tactical, upon You. I speak of a Micro-political power that is not utopian or dialectical in its pursuit(s), as it is always becoming something else, and neither is it confined or locked in definite relationships or Micro-Fascisms, but rather is spiraling as it creates and re-creates itself. I speak here of Micro-fascisms that operate on a cellular degree. I speak of Micro-Fascisms that grow “not, perhaps out of the fact that…[they] can seize power at the macro-political level; any state can do that…[but rather horrific fascisms that penetrate] the smallest nooks and crannies of the social organism” (Call, 2003: 52). I speak of a “rural [Micro] fascism and city or neighborhood [Micro] fascism, [Micro] fascism of the Left and [Micro] fascism of the Right, [Micro] fascism of the couple, family, school and office” (Call, 2003: 52). I speak of Micro-fascism(s) that require overcoming(s) through becoming(s) and whose presence provides the necessary breeding ground for the germination and conditions of thinking which makes the state possible in the first place (Call, 2003: 51). I speak of becoming(s) which connote a “kind of radical personal responsibility” and permanent revolutions against our own selves with every waking moment of every day in retaliations to these Micro-fascism(s). After all “organizing signifies first, work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective ‘singularity’” (Guattari and Negri, 1985: 116). I speak of Micro-fascism(s) that stand on their own, then “communicate with other [Micro-fascisms] before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole” (Call, 2003: 52). The central black hole, I speak of here, that I had not lost sight of and that I mentioned formerly, Eurocentric Capitalism, is a Macro-fascism, and intertwined with it, the Eurocentric-ally conceived State, another form of authority, another Macro-fascism, albeit an abstract authority. The authority subsumed by and through the modern Eurocentric State, takes on an abstract and generic form, that is strategic and centered as it is “a prudent institution [that proclaims that it is for] the protection of individuals against one another” but at any rate invites the dissolution and enfeebling of the individuals within it; that is its function (Call, 2003: 50). It is a Macro-Fascist institution, an organized bureaucracy, whose desire is to enforce the creation of a homogeneous political culture, eradicating difference as opposed to liberating it and repeating everything as opposed to creating anything (Call, 2003: 46). It is a Macro-fascist institution that is hierarchical and whose eco-political frameworks are set up, put into place and protected by those whom cannot lead or obey it themselves (Perez, 1990: 20). A Macro-fascism, the modern state, that “is infinitely bound up with [Eurocentric] Capitalism…as part of the [Eurocentric] Capitalist machine: capital and the [Eurocetnric] state…[are] a system of signifiers within individuals as infinite debt” (Newman, 2001: 99). Macro-fascistic ‘structures’, in the most fluid of senses, that refuse to be addressed in any names but ’the holy State’ and ‘God-Capital’, till these names, these signifiers become, if not almost become, “religious signifiers which individuals are subordinated to” (Newman, 2001: 99).
The third plateau anticipates the Islamic Anarchistic Becomings of a multiplicitous, non-fictional and plural Nous, as a form of resistance to our two former featured enemies. I bear witness that Islams commits no shirk, testifies not, to its responsibilities towards declaring its desire for ‘the other’, any ‘other’, to live. It, at least theoretically, longs not to render ineffective any beauty belonging to ‘the other’ and accepts for ‘the other’ to declare itself as it desires to be, never insisting, never camouflaging, never masking the rights of ‘the other’, within and without itself to such an extent that it strives, as Post-Anarchism, at least in theory, for Nous. Nous denotes becomings of a fluid “us” between these two ways of living, Islams and Post-Anarchism (Chapter Three). Nous, a rhizomatic “us” that is unlike trees or their roots. A rhizomatic “us” that connects any point from You to any other point with I and any point from I to another point with You (May, 1994: 53). Nous whose attributes are traits not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature, attesting to difference. I speak of Nous that brings to play not units but dimensions, discovered and undiscovered, or rather directions of motions, of the You and the I, and hence always resigned to fluxes of difference. A Nous speaking volumes as it has neither beginnings nor ends, but always a middle from which it grows and which it overspills (May: 1994: 53). A Nous that indicates, albeit even if but temporally, that You and I, have disappeared. Disappeared not into a colorless and puritanical “one”, rather a hospitable and friendly multiple. A Nous “characterized by a radical openness to an outside…[as it] embraces four characteristics: connection, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and rupture…[and whose] purpose…is to allow thought ‘to shake off its model, makes its grass grow-even locally at the margins, imperceptibly’” (Newman, 2001: 105). A Nous, like the thousand flowers left to blossom and bloom, without organizational slogans and even less an enlightened prediction, on the terrains of undermined capitalist and authoritarian disciplinarian regimes of madness and their machines (Guattari and Negri, 1985: 132). A Nous composed and always “recomposed and [that] will multiply as a subversive and innovative presence” (Guattari and Negri, 1985: 132). A Nous, a war-machine, that “constitutes an outside to the state…characterized by an absolute exteriority…[and that is] purely conceptual: it is an image of thought, an idea without an object…a non-place, a space characterized by pluralities, multiplicities, difference, and becoming…an assault of the physical place”, the Eurocentric State (Newman, 2001: 108-109). A Nous whose invention becomes a ‘system’, not built upon abstract unifications, but rather new lines of alliances, new lines of co-operations and new ways of living (Guattari and Negri, 1985: 127). A Nous, a way of living, “that rejects binary divisions and hierarchies, does not privilege one thing over another, [You over I, I over You] and is not governed by a single unfolding [governing] logic [but rather innocent becoming(s)” (Newman, 2001: 105-106). Been through Times Square on a Saturday night? Did You disappear or were You re-born? Me? A polygamous both.
Chapter One: Kapital’s Wet Dream: Islams & Post-Anarchisms
No Hospitality
Has it become that easy for you to proclaim that you are just a Post-Anarchist? Has it become easy for me to admit that I am just a Muslim? What do you and I know about either? I admit. You proclaim otherwise. You deceive yourself, not me. Are you about to accuse me of fascism? Fascism begins when you insult an animal, including the animal in “man” (Derrida, 2005:181). I did not insult you. Then your accusation is for? For imposing labels on you? You picked the label of fascism in your mind and uttered it out loud, thinking that I have lost my hearing, not I. Who is the imposer of labels now? Tell me then and I shall listen, what and who is a Post-Anarchist? What and who is a Muslim? What “is”? If you are proposing that these signifiers are something to be taught and just “are”, think again. You are assuming they can be. Taught by whom, you and I? Defined by whom, You and I for everyone else? It now seems that you are interested in the same fascism I am? I tell you this. These signifiers do not signify theories, they are ways of living, ways of being in the world; attitudes (Perez, 1990: 67). “Sylvere Lotringer is an an(archist). The Italian ‘autonomists’ are an(archists). And the Rastafarians, with their own language (patios) and lifestyle, are also an(archsits). An(archy) takes as many forms as there are individuals” (Perez, 1990: 67). But and without being chauvinistic; in their own language and lifestyles they are all Muslims as well. Theatre and factory, your desire yearns for the solitary. Your desire traverses few lives. I? I desire a taste for the grandeur, a desire for addressing those whom have come before I, those who will come after I, or are already after I, a desire of promises interrupted, broken all of a sudden, and yet still indestructible. A desire where the subjectivities of a “we”, Nous”, the You, the “tu”, and the I, transgress the “is” and race instead, in haste, with, through, in and out of un-despairing fluxes. Un-despairing fluxes? Yes, un-despairing fluxes of becoming(s). My movements of speaking are speaking…
The only other thing is the opening attack on Eurocentric Capitalism
I do not welcome a stranger here. The stranger here becomes Eurocentric Capitalism. A Eurocentric Capitalism whom is understood and judged through Post-Anarchism as entailing a certain mode or “a ‘method’ of Capital...specific procedure[s] of valorization of commodities…goods, activities…services”, subjects and objects (Alliez, 1996: 233). Listen. A Eurocentric Capitalism whom is determined through Post-Anarchism and its inherited Classical Anarchism(s) as positing a generation “of a particular type of social relation; here, regulation[s], laws, usages and practices [that] come to the fore” (Alliez, 1996: 233). A Eurocentric Capitalism whom offends Post-Anarchism and its inherited Classical Anarchism(s) as it is constituted merely by “process[es] of production…material forces, human labor, social relations… investments of desire” (Alliez, 1996: 234).
Now and first, I work, I write, and consider Content, Expression and the Components of Expression, the cruelly arranged nervous system, if You will, belonging to it, Eurocentric Capitalism. Here, I will teach You of Islams’ Property, define for You caretaker(s). I will ‘speak’ of “the principle of social control of production” by caretakers. I tell You and discuss with You “[Useful] Profit-sharing as…[a] basis…[for] distributing equally the resources and output of production, [and that are] activated in” Islams through particular principles (Choudhury, 1997: 107). I will ‘speak’ and You will ‘hear’ that “[Useful] Profit-sharing is implicit in the Koran…[through an] instrument known as Mudarabah or Musharakah…the principal alternative to interest-bearing transactions” (Choudhury, 1997: 110). I will ‘speak’ of other principles attained through Islams, “the joint role of profit-sharing and equity participation under economic profit-cooperation/equity-sharing (Muddarabah/Musharakah), [the] abolition of interest (Riba), [the] institution of Wealth tax for specific targets of spending, and the abolition of economic waste in consumption and production (Israf)” (Choudhury, 1997: 108). I will ‘speak’ of how “the elimination [if not minimization] of Israf links…to the efficiency of Mudarabah, which then provides the impetus to eliminate Riba…itself…considered a form of Israf…[and] since Zakat, disbursement, is a positive function of absolute poverty…[there] will be an enhancing effect…to combat poverty and generate more distribution” in a community Choudhury, 1997: 111). All these violent reactions, all these ‘I speaks’, against your Eurocentric language like your Eurocentric Capitalism are not to merely commercially invite You into my world. Rather I write, I ‘speak’ to introduce to You that Islams, as an invention, as Post-Anarchism, notices the vampirish activity of Eurocentric Capitalism and offers an alternative. Islams spoke and continues to speak loud to hear only its own scream and which has met no answer nor anything that draws its force away from such a scream until it found you, Post-Anarchism and your inherited Classical Anarchism(s) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975: 92). Listen and You will hear Islams are Anti-Capitalist.
I warn you of your limits. So I tell you that you will have just begun to comprehend what this chapter is pursing by the end. But in order to comprehend it, it will become necessary for you to pass through its nets, its ‘new’, at least to you, visible creations, concepts and languages. I will clear a path for you but first you will have done well to admit that you are in a foreign country, about to experience a foreign language and foreign concepts, which you cannot speak for yourself but that will be addressed to you into a language, your language, and that indeed you do speak (Deleuze & Guattari, 1975: 94).
Content, Expression and Components of Expression
For this section it, Eurocentric Capitalism, becomes a god. How do I ‘speak’ of the Content, the being, of such a god? I ‘speak’ of such a god as a being whose essence is parasitic never symbiotic. A god whose expression and whose signification with such an expression are announced as Rhizomatic Ecumenical Capitalism. How do we speak of this signification, this Expression, Rhizomatic Ecumenical Capitalism? And how do we speak of the Expressive Components of this god? The god, this Rhizomatic Ecumenical Capitalism, offers hospitality to Components, Capitalist Machines, and which are spoken of here through the two ‘head types’ it possesses. I ‘speak’ of two head types, their respective apparatuses of capture and processes, decoding and de-territorialization. I would have longed a collapse of distinction between them, head types, decoding and deterritorialization, seeing them as always referring to the other-seeing a transformation in one area as always having implications in others (Newman, 2001: 98). But I choose and I ‘speak’ then of these head types, apparatuses of capture and processes, that return upon each other, double for each other, only to unfold and explain for You, to You, Eurocentric Capitalisms’ depth.
First, a head, a machine, desiring Wealth and which offers hospitality to or is comprised of Four Apparatuses of Capture: Ground Rent, Surplus Profit, Inheritance & Taxes, all premised upon Eurocentric conceptions rises. This first ‘head’ named Wealth belonging to this god is “no longer…determined as money dealing, merchant’s or landed wealth, but must become pure homogeneous and independent capital”; a free flow of capital (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 452). So I now speak here and in depth of this head, of god’s first head, Wealth. Wealth through Eurocentric Capitalism becomes “a right, or, to be more precise, a relation of production that is manifested as a right, and as such it is independent of the concrete form that it cloaks at each moment of its productive function” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 453). Wealth becomes a private appropriation of the public (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 451). And this Wealth becomes hospitable to? Private Property. Private Property that expresses the independence of a Master or Owner, or a group of Masters or Owners (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 453). A Master or Owner here is “not the one who achieves [the] recognition of the slave, but the one who dismisses the project of recognition altogether, in order to create something new…what characterizes the slave [here], then, is not the failure to obtain recognition, but the attempt to elicit it” (May, 1994: 134). Rather than the expression of a bond of personal dependences, Public Property, there is sole bond, Private Property (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 453). I tell You, Private Property through Eurocentric Capitalism is in itself a right, an active right and presupposes Public Property (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 427-453).
The second head, another head, a machine, takes place, desiring and lusting before Involuntary Relations again premised upon a Eurocentric conception of Labor. Then I say to You, these two heads, these two machines, belonging to this one god, to this Rhizomatic Ecumenical Capitalism, are not to presume and dismiss that there are not other discovered or undiscovered heads to which this god of a capitalist machine(s) offers hospitality to. “It is their abstract conjunction [that of the two heads chosen here that] in a single stroke constitutes [Eurocentric] Capitalism, providing a universal subject and an object in general for one another” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 453). And what becomes of the second ‘head’? The second ‘head’ named Involuntary Relations, connotes associations between ‘owners’ and ‘owned’ guided though “the flow[s] of labor…no longer…determined as slavery or serfdom but…naked and free labor” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 452). Here I will ‘break’ abruptly and temporarily from un-deciphering Involuntary Relations only to return to it further and later in And the Store at the level of the Maids and the Employees. Instead I turn to the question below.
Is it useless to ask in what sense is Rhizomatic Ecumenical Capitalism’s depth decipherable-undecipherable? What is being explained here through this question? What is being explained is a pondering as to what are the conditions both of possibility and impossibility for Eurocentric Capitalism to hide at depth, always through its collectivities, its components of expression, its two head types, even when it seems or appears upon the surface to be emitted as a solitary singularity? And so…
It is Essential here that You and I should not banish from mind the idea of god’s guilt
In the depth, these heads, these collectivities, are rhizomatic like the rhizomatic ‘us’ I spoke of formerly in the Introduction. A rhizomatic ‘us’, a model that defies the very idea of a model as it is an endless, haphazard multiplicity of connections not dominated by a single site, center or place, but that is rather decentralized and plural, inter-being, intermezzo (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 25). Its plurality, that belonging to the rhizomatic ‘us’, permits it to move “between things…going from one thing [subject and/or object] to the other and back again…a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other way, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 25). Its fabric is then that of “conjunction, ‘and…and…and’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 25). The middle from which it operates is by no means an average of all of god’s heads but rather quite the contrary it is where things pick up speed and its effects become intensified (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980: 25). After all how can there be an average, if there are undiscovered heads to this god that are not accounted for here? I ‘speak’ then of two heads whom at depth are engaging in what is referred to as decoding and de-territorialization. I ‘speak’ of ‘two heads’ belonging to a god, Eurocentric Capitalism; an apparatus of capture through these two processes of decoding and de-territorialization. Now I explain for you decoding and de-territorializaiton and remember, I tell You, remember, that I longed for their collapse.
Decoding, is linked to axiomization. Axiomization, a process of strategic value to Eurocentric Capitalism, whose streams of quantified factors of production, raw materials, skills and knowledge are conjoined with desires to extract a differential surplus from any subject and any object (Holland, 1996: 241). Decoding is always a positive movement, supporting and yet given birth to by axiomization. Decoding, a transformation of all that is meaningful to You and I, including the You and I, subjects, and the ‘this’ and ‘that’, objects, into a calculable quantity (Holland, 1996: 241). Decoding signifies the means and impetus for an act of de-territorialization. De-territorialization of what and whom, as You beg for a response? De-territorialization of every social You and I, ‘he’ and ‘she’, ‘this’ and ‘that’ and ‘that’ and ‘that’ and ‘them’ and ‘them’; every subject and every object. Yes You? Why? Remember ‘it’, Eurocentric Capitalism, of which I ‘speak’ of, is a parasite. A parasite that desires the disconnection, unplugging, and the reconnection, plugging, of the You and I, the ‘this’ and ‘that’ into either of its two heads. I tell You though that there is a differential difference between de-territoriralization and decoding that ought to be noted. De-territorialization functions or acts upon the physical. I ‘speak’ of physical bodies acted upon, without the permission or consent of either the subject or object, and which de-territorialization demands material investments and energy from, through acts of production or consumption (Holland, 1996: 242). Decoding, functions upon that which carries symbolic representations and again without permission or consent, demands investments, energy, of the mental type as in cognition and fantasy (Holland, 1996: 242). Decoding I say then is an ushering in of a symbolic order. A symbolic order always operating on all that is quantitative and whose objects are insignificant or strictly meaningless within the cash nexus of the market. I explain further through an offering of an example. Do you think it matters? What matters? Nothing! Precisely! It matters not, of whatever gender workers are. To this decoding process, machine, all that is solid is melted into air and what becomes of importance is that subjects, labor, and/or objects, land, are equated to calculable amounts, in the example, of surplus labor-power or surplus land-power. It, decoding, functions between, through, within and without the You and I, ‘this’ and ‘that’, and converts all social relations to desiring machines that become subject to subsumption under markets and exchange values (Holland, 1996: 244). I ‘speak’, through Post-Anarchism and its inherited Classical Anarchism(s), then of markets and exchange values that mobilize desire, by “freeing it from capture by any stable, all-embracing code-only to recapture it, it must be said, via the recoding of advertising, for example, which re-territorializes it onto the objects of the latest administered consumer fad” (Holland, 1996: 244). I ‘speak’, through Post-Anarchism and its inherited Classical Anarchism(s), then of markets that seek to de-territorialize and decode everything organically pre-programmed into re-programmed “objects [and subjects] of investment such as the [, Your,] mother’s breast…so that investments can be made elsewhere” (Holland, 1996: 242). You and I, ‘her’ and ‘his’, ‘this’ and ‘that’, like your mother’s breasts and breast milk, become subjects and objects of economic value and the productivity of these underlying subjects and objects constitute an essence to both Wealth and Involuntary Relations, god’s two heads.
I am becoming vulgar and so I now insist then and remind you that god has two heads offering hospitality to decoding and de-territorializing, two heads that are neither exiled from nor radiating from one another but are rather, more clearly, rhizomatic heads, delocalized, decentralized but connected, in ‘affinity’, in ‘solidarity but without solidity’, for lack of a better word, in ‘Fluidarity’ (Guattari, 1989: 15). I ‘speak’ and tell You, through Post-Anarchism and its inherited Classical Anarchism(s), that these two heads seldom functioning separately, each exhibiting the possibility of being identified and thereby associated with certain differential mode(s) of domination. I ‘speak’ again, again and again, and tell You, here and now of the associations amidst, through, within, without and which these two heads and their respective ‘techniques’ of domination and their associated powers operate. More particularly I tell You of the types of forces they utilize, oppressive, yes, but, and, that give birth to, resistance.
Types of forces then and here that are not premised upon master – slave dialectical oppositions, a top-down model of power, or a bottom-up model of power as Classical Anarchism(s) had thought and spoke, and which now Post-Anarchism only now admits was invalid on behalf of its former self: They, Classical Anarchism(s), were mislead and hence without humiliation Post-Anarchism corrects such a former self. Rather I ‘speak’ of forces whose essence now becomes in that they are rhizomatic, ever present anywhere and everywhere and represent power. These types of forces, oppression and resistance, here bear together instead a conscious desire to pledge allegiance to one another, the unconscious desire to co-exist together. These types of forces are un-premised upon dialectical oppositions, as I wrote earlier, and cannot exist without one another, with one dominating and the other resisting instantaneously and always. I ‘speak’ then and tell You that these types of forces, powers, interplay alongside with, against, for and through one another and cause the oppression or occupation and libe