All in one place: Hydra on OWS
- miniBiography and the 99%
“Listening to Storycorp, I consider the human microphone: (a) the emphasis it places on voice, on the word spoken back aloud; (b) Joseph Stiglitz’s awkwardness; (c) how a friend once told me about a couples’ counseling technique (reflection technique?) that requires one partner to repeat what she heard the other say before she may respond. If the human microphone is therapy, what is the pathology?”
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“Personally I am susceptible to a questionable line of thinking when it comes to what to read to rally yourself to revolution. In part it is because I am suspicious of rallies. But also because, when out in a mob, one can still reserve a right to ask what would Ezra Pound think? … Something to do with blanket antagonism and a necessary fostering of chaos.”
- Hydra’s Occupy Wall Street Reading List
“I got my copy of Anti-Oedipus today and felt compelled to quote a part of Foucault’s preface to the book. Powerfully relevant to the OWS situation. Here is Foucault praising Anti-Oedipus (I italicized particularly relevant instructions for a “non-fascist” revolutionary form-of-life):
*Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.
*Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
*Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
*Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
*Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
*Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
*Do not become enamored with power.”
The last instruction says to me: “Do not imitate the system you are struggling to topple”; but it also says, “Do not legislate your demands in the language of the enemy; or else the enemy will find the means of refuting each one of your demands.”
