Boundless Conformity

Received via email

Zbigniew Herbert, who participated in the resistance movement in WW2, wrote the poem “Episode in a Library.”

A blond girl is bent over a poem. With a pencil sharp as a lancet she
transfers the words to a blank page and renders them into strokes, accents,
caesuras. The lament of a fallen poet now looks like a salamander eaten
away by ants.

When we carried him away under machine gun fire I believed that his
still-warm body would be resurrected in the word. Now as I watch the
death of the words I know there is no limit to decay. All that will be left
after us in the black earth will be scattered syllables. Accents over
nothingness and dust.

Social Democracy had decayed, said Walter Benjamin in his 1940 essay “On the Concept
of History,” without the expectation that revolution would make “the continuum of history explode.” Already, within three decades, Social Democrats had managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, associated as it was with insurrection, “though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the 19th century.”

Benjamin pointedly excepted from his contempt the Spartacist tendency of Rosa Luxembourg. It had kept alive the idea of radical rupture, naming itself after the slave revolt in antiquity that made the Roman Empire tremble at the name of Spartacus.

The decay continues apace. Now even “social justice outrage” must follow “revolution” and “insurrection” into ignominy.

Why? “Terms pertaining to social justice, anti-Israel protests, and antisemitic incidents [overlap] together,” such that “the language of human rights experiences extreme erosion (i.e., complete misappropriation) on social media with respect to Israel,” and, indeed, “the social justice tropes/virtue signaling we analyze on social media may stir animosity to inspire real world attacks or incidents.”

These are the conclusions of an outfit called Network Contagion Research Institute, associated with Rutgers University. Essentially, as we shall see, their undertaking is to discredit subversion by associating it with “serviceable villains,” to use John Lennon’s phrase.

This Social Democratic enterprise needs no anarchist assistance, to state the obvious. But nonetheless, so far has the decay progressed that, indeed, it receives such assistance!

I speak of Alexander Reid Ross, who contributes to these abominable NCRI reports. He is the author of The Fascist Creep, and is a former member, as was I, of the anarchist collective that operated the Dry River Radical Resource Center, a popular venue for music and other events in Tucson, Arizona from 2004-2012. Our collective of crossed
destinies prompts this tale of the commonplace, news of the strange.

Best Anarchist Collective 2008, Tuscon Weekly

Response to Tuscon Weekly

When criticized some time ago for the crudity of his “scholarship,” Reid Ross, now Professor of Geography at Portland State University, sought to use his association with me at Dry River to deflect the criticism. My response was published by Anarchist News.

Words fail me, as they fail others, and as a good Daoist, I’m always happy to point out the failure of words. Despite my derision, Reid Ross, as noted, remains a writer of reports for the NCRI, where he labors in the intellectual vineyard alongside cops and Zionists, as we shall see.

At about the same time Fredy Perlman predicted, in his essay“"Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom,” that the cheerleaders for the State of Israel would label Jewish critics of the Zionist project Traitors to the Race, one of my flyers predicted the “ugly, impoverished language” represented by NCRI reports.

poster

But how could it be otherwise, given the intimate link between occupied lands and occupied language?

comic

Witlessness certainly creeps! Never mind the persistence of real anti-Semitism, now NCRI have gone so far as to associate reference to “apartheid” or “settler colonialism” with evidence of Jew-hatred, as they put it, in a report published earlier this year with “unapologetic Zionist” boosters from another academic outfit called Boundless.

“The difference between ordinary people and university professors is that the latter have arrived at ignorance after long and painful study,” as Oscar Wilde said.

Even a short study of this report will be painful! Not that it lacks humor, however unwitting. They note that their findings “don’t give insight into the context and character of the negative messaging.”

For that you need–what else?--a “machine learning algorithm, word2vec, which maps the strength of word associations in a shared corpus, to characterize and model changes in the context and character of messaging during the May conflict over time on Twitter.”

Yes, context and character are assured with the machine learning algorithm, word2vec. As Frank Zappa sang in “Cozmik Debris,” “You might not believe this little fellow but it’ll cure your asthma, too!”

Still, the “scholar warriors” and “innovator adventurers” at Boundless who are attempting to make ignorance appear data-driven impress me as rather more formidable than Reid Ross.

The conformist stance which characterizes the approach of Reid Ross to fascism was summed up with perfect banality by the Boundless report: “A recent blossoming of research in political psychology has shown a great many symmetries in the attitudes and beliefs held by people on the left and right.”

So stay in the comfortable Middle Places! These were scathingly ridiculed by Jonathan Kozol in his sober, heartbreaking 1975 book The Night is Dark and I Am Far From Home, which records the unmaking of a counterculture:

Schools do their best to fend off the intensities of grief, the tangible
realities of unjust power, and the necessity for taking sides. . . . Above all
else, they teach us how to trim the sails of our most deep and serious
convictions, to limit the fury, to water down the passion and to understate
the pain. . . . The student learns to step back and to steer away from moral
confrontations. He learns to ascertain the quickest highway and the best
approach to middle places of inert compassion and dysfunctional concern:
places where choice does not reside and anger does not threaten. . . . The
person who states, with undiluted rage, that public schools are
compromised above all by their perseverance in the loyal service of a
murderous nation and an unjust social order risks instantly the loss of
5income, reassuring smiles and serene position in a middle ground of
half-perceived and only half-articulated anger.

NCRI promotes itself by proclaiming, that, in our present age of “Information Disorder,” it can “detect coordinated and inauthentic activity” and can show “how amplified disinformation operations from state actors and extremist groups take aim at American brands.” Brand lives matter, after all.

Here we have the Determination Police, announced by Angela Carter in her 1972 novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman. They, too, “wanted to freeze the entire freak show the city had become back into attitudes of perfect propriety.” As their confidential secretary put it, “We did our best to keep what was outside, out, and what was inside, in; we built a vast wall of barbed wire round the city to quarantine the unreality . . . .”

Alas, unreality escapes all quarantines. Annie Le Brun recognizes

. . . the machine’s contradictory power of materializing an abstraction
which itself establishes the materiality of beings and things. This is a fact
without precedent in the history of representation: here is an object over
which the square dance carried on by proper and figurative meanings will
have no influence at all. Moreover, they will be able to give only the most
deceptive idea of it, since the image of the machine not only represents a
functioning, but also suggests the principle of functioning as a mode of
representation. And so, at a time when the sky is growing empty, when the
6classical system of representation is sinking behind the horizon with the
idea of God, the eighteenth century lets itself be flabbergasted by the
emergence of the machine as a model of representation which installs
itself in front of the stage and sends thought back into the depths.

The “classical system of representation” had already accommodated apologists for the first Western occupation by a terrorist State, that of Messenia by Sparta. Messenia had been subjugated by the Spartans in the 8th century B.C. and its inhabitants forced as helots to work the land for their Spartan masters, uncannily anticipating the Boundless report’s problem with social justice: “Active warfare dies down rapidly along with neutral conflict-descriptive social media signals. Weaponised conflict language (social justice outrage), protests, and antisemitic activity, however, appear to share a prolonged distribution beyond the life of the conflict itself.”

Indeed, the active warfare by which ancient Sparta conquered adjacent Messenia took up to a hundred years. Only after another three hundred years or so did Messenian resistance to this occupation triumph. “Weaponised conflict language (social justice outrage)” no doubt contributed to this prolonged resistance and its eventual success.

“Antisemitic activity,” however, is entirely absent. Sparta was not a Jewish State, so it can hardly be antisemitic to consider the practices of this military superpower that made it so hateful. (One of which was exporting its expertise in terror, called, of course, “counter-terrorism.”)

How did Sparta occasion such social justice outrage and hatred without Jews present? Might the imperatives associated with subjugating a large population with their own culture give rise to “social justice outrage” and “hatred” independent of ethnicity?

Spartan hegemony was maintained by unrelenting and calculated (not to mention bizarre) brutality. Asked how so few Spartans controlled so many Messenians, a Spartan commander said not a word, picked up a sickle, and walked into a nearby field of wheat, where he methodically cut off any head of grain sticking up above the others.

Jacob Burckhardt said, “. . . The power of Sparta seems to have come into being almost entirely for itself and for its own self-assertion, and its constant pathos was the enslavement of subject peoples and the extension of its own dominion as an end unto itself.”

Roberto Calasso observed, “The Spartans were perfectly aware of the atrocious suffering they were inflicting and never imagined their victims could forget it. The solution was to establish terror as a normal condition of life–and that was Sparta’s great invention: to create a situation in which terror was seen as something normal.”

As described by Plato, part of a Spartan’s training was the exercise known as the krypteia:

It was organized as follows. The commanders of the young men would
from time to time send off into the country, some in one direction, some in
another, those young men who seemed smartest. They would be armed
with daggers and supplied with basic rations, but nothing else. During the
8day they would fan out into uncharted territory, find a place to hid and rest
there; at night they came down onto the roads, if they found a helot, would
cut his throat. Oϔen they would organize forays into the fields and kill the
biggest and strongest helots.

Calasso again: “They kept their helots in a state of terror–yet were compelled to live in terror of their helots. They carried their spears with them everywhere, for death might be lurking at every turn.”

“They watched the helots, too many of them, working in the fields, and knew that one day they would have to kill one. They also knew that they must always be on the lookout, always carry a weapon. They knew they must close their doors with special keys. They could sense the hatred of the helots.”

“It was to the Spartans’ credit that they were the first to appreciate the extent to which the social order is based on hatred–and can survive only so long as that base is maintained.”

“They were the great sophists Socrates had mentioned in Protagoras, those who used their sophistry not to show off their glory but to hide it. They were the ephors, first example of a wholly godless power. But they didn’t let people see that side of them either; on the contrary, not content with all the existing cults, they brought in a new one, to which they were deeply devoted. They built a temple to Fear, close to the communal dining hall.

‘They didn’t honor her as a dark demon to be kept at bay, but because they believed that the State was held together mainly thanks to fear.’”

Athens supplied Western civilization with the fraud of democracy, but the genuine article of oligarchy and occupation was delivered by Sparta. Sparta is the true, grim inspiration of endless occupations by terrorist States. Roberto Calasso notes “. . . the attraction Plato always felt toward Sparta, right up to the late Laws: that order of theirs seemed capable of putting a stop to the proliferation of images.”

The more hateful the State becomes, the more hate itself is forbidden, the better to preserve docility, and this was so even when Walter Benjamin lamented that the German working class had forgotten “both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”

Benjamin’s identification in 1940 of conformism with Social Democracy explicitly denounced its uncritical attitude toward technological development: “The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from its beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological development as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form.”

So the persistent appeal of fascism in a world that never ceases celebrating technological advancement is to be expected. Where technological sophistication is concerned, fascism got there “firstest with the mostest,” to quote one of their infamous Confederate antecedents. In WW2 Germany deployed the first operational jet fighters (the ME-262) and the first operational jet bomber (the AR-234). Even today the assault rifle has not ceased its ravages . . . .

It is this legacy of high-tech mastery which keeps fascism galloping (only an academic clod would think it creeps) around the world.

The retrogression Benjamin associated with technological development may be seen as perfected in the determination to return to a martial society as the perfection of technology (Friedrich Juenger’s term). This is incomprehensible to Social Democracy, as Benjamin perceived: “It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in fascism.”

Even before Social Democracy embraced the machine absolutely, identification with the machine had undercut the critical possibilities opened up by atheism in the 18th century, as Annie LeBrun recognized: “. . .It is quite possible that the reductive machine may have played a decisive role in the epistemological rupture spotted by Michel Foucault at the end of the eighteenth century in Europe. If the machine functions primarily as a materialization of movement and the chain of causes and effects, couldn’t this be why we are increasingly tempted to abandon the representation of evidence, leaving visible forms behind as we plunge into the heart of things, towards their organizing principle?”

“Origin is the goal,” Benjamin quotes Karl Kraus as saying. If Susan Sontag is right and fascism is a spiritual ideal, this determination to realize technology in a return to a strictly military organization might be the expression of that ideal. After all, the origin of technical organization can be located in the first military hierarchies, according to Jacques Ellul.

Meanwhile, Israeli arms company Elbit contributes significantly to the militarized border here in southern Arizona. They could teach Zappa’s Central Scrutinizer a few things! At the recent memorial for Raymond Mattia reported by Brenda Norrell of Censored News, I was reminded that all phone conversations in the community of Ali Jegk where he was murdered are monitored and not considered private.

Once upon a time Alexander Reid Ross helped serve food at a Dry River event supporting indigenous resistance. Only a few years later he now serves the repression of such resistance by working with unapologetic Zionists such as the “scholar warriors” of Boundless who help terrorize border communities.

Boundless coyly notes Israel is the only Jewish State in the world. There is not even one Daoist state in the world (perish the thought!) and, indeed, if one did exist it would be one Daoist state too many!

No State has a right to exist, especially the Exceptional Entities! All their rationales–secular, clerical, infernal–are irrational. More than ever, only the abolition of the global commodity production system offers the prospect not only for social life organized around play but also the preservation of human traditions of mutual assistance.

Anarchy is order without authority. Because it bases society on play, it may be taken seriously. Because it bases economy on the gift, it is given legitimacy. It always wins out, though it never competes. It always convinces, though it never argues. It does not show itself and so is always conspicuous, attracts though it does not summon, does nothing yet accomplishes everything.

Before moving to Tucson almost thirty years ago, I was a member of another legendary collective, Hoedads, in the Pacific Northwest. I found the rudeness, crudeness and lewdness of woods workers contagious indeed. I am a treeplanter poet, Dada driven, and I object to the destiny of my former Dry River comrade Alexander Reid Ross.

The perfection of retrogression approaches with the infinite expansion of meaning. Fittingly, the Jorge Borges fragment “On Exactitude in Science” expressed this in a cartographic image appropriate for the dismissal of a professor of Geography such as Reid Ross:

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that
the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of
13the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time those Unconscionable
Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of
the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point
for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the
Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map
was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered
it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West,
still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and
Beggars: in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of
Geography.
Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Lang Gore
Riddle Management


Concluding Non-Aesthetic Postscript, January 2024
The ancient Greeks may have been outraged by Sparta’s occupation of Messenia, the land of Nestor, one of the few characters in The Iliad who appears favorably. But only the military innovations of Epaminondas and the Theban phalanx halted it. Today the world is outraged by the genocide perpetrated by the Zionist entity against Palestine. The endless streaming of war crimes does not halt them, however. “What is the difference between a moment ago and a thousand years ago when things are the way they are now?” Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars. Let recorded culture show it is not so much clutter, now as then

There are 3 Comments

"Like Adolf Hitler, Ross suffers from flatulence."

Cba to read all that but this was a zinger yeah?

SUPERB! I'd love to see more anarchist analysis/ commentary/ ridicule of this caliber!
P.S. You won't find it on "it's Going Down"...

more gushing here, great writing but just one little thing

I love this quote

"Anarchy is order without authority. Because it bases society on play, it may be taken seriously. Because it bases economy on the gift, it is given legitimacy. It always wins out, though it never competes. It always convinces, though it never argues. It does not show itself and so is always conspicuous, attracts though it does not summon, does nothing yet accomplishes everything."

But anarchy "never argues"? come on now ... anyway, i love it!

Add new comment