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I'll come to language inamo, but I wanna address first of all the implicit issue in the TOTW description: the issue of how to handle/resist abuse or interpersonal demands without violating autonomy or falling back on normative superego controls or “zero tolerance”. This is a difficult issue for anarchism in particular (and not for other belief-systems) because the conventional approach is to use morality and law to handle interpersonal harm and distress. But this involves the development of authoritarian bioenergetic dynamics. As shown in Nietzsche, Stirner, Deleuze and Reich, morality is an artificial emotional effect of self-hatred and sadism, arising from the blockage or inhibition of basic bioenergetic forces. It involves the formation of a superego – a part of the ego which splits off from the ego itself, so as to exercise domination over the ego (and the id/desire) – generally an internalisation of social power (a cop in the head, an internalised parent). This seems to happen through a three-stage process of “active desire” turning “reactive” - first desire is simply frustrated in the world, leading to negative emotions like anger, fear, and frustration; then desire turns against itself, with part of it coming to hate both the frustrated desire and the frustrating agent; finally, desire reroutes through or around this inner blockage, taking new forms which are complicit with repression. Anarchism is in large part about refusing this logic of blockage and distortion and creating autonomous spaces/relations where it doesn't apply.

In egoist anarchism, actions stem from desire. Whatever principles people might have are ultimately rooted in their desires, and there is no pretence otherwise (Nietzsche calls this an ethos – something like a way of being, a way of life – as opposed to a morality). This means that moral agency is never “outsourced” to spooks or social aggregates. There are no general morals, rules, or natural rights distinct from the will of particular actors. This means that we can't go round banning, excluding, stigmatising, etc based on violation of social-scale norms or rules. Anyone telling an egoist anarchist what counts as “acceptable behaviour” will rightly be told to fuck off. The problem, then, is that this “rule against rules” also applies to prohibiting things which are authoritarian, or which go against one's own desires in a fundamental way.

Is there a solution? I think Stirner and Nietzsche are some of the way to formulating one. We're allowed to have a personal sense of good/bad which is defined by each of our unique desires and existential orientations (Nietzsche: from a sheep's point of view, wolves are evil). Because it stems from desire, this type of reaction isn't a spook. It's just a kind of personal incompatibility. (I sometimes use the analogy of dangerous wild animals: I don't think bears or crocodiles are “evil”, I don't want to wipe them out or lock them up, but I also don't want one in my living room). Stirner's “rule”: there's no criminals, only enemies (someone can't be beyond the pale because they break some moral rule against abuse or whatever; but someone who violates one's or one's affines' autonomy might be, situationally, an “enemy”... bearing in mind this is not a lasting label, is purely relative to one's internal locus of good/bad, and its exercise can't itself go against the desire/will to which it is in service). Enmity is always in situ, it relates to a particular situation, it doesn't define the essence of the antagonists (who are both unique-ones). It's a variant on schiz-flux which goes with the schiz rather than the flux.

If we're living among anarchists, or people with anti-authoritarian personalities, then most people will do and say what they feel like, most of the time. Superego inhibitions will be a lot weaker or nonexistent. (In practice, anarchic spaces are PARTIALLY like this – because there are also a lot of anarchists with strong superegos). This is, of course, going to mean that people distress each other sometimes. And there's a whole problem with weak-willed people being pressured by stronger-willed people, leading to hierarchies. (The example discussed in the TOTW involves someone using a social label in order to gain greater tolerance for living more anarchically). One response to this, is to default back to ethical constraints and labels – certain people are “abusers” and need to be shunned, certain “behaviours” are un-anarchist and not to be tolerated, etc. In my view, this response lets superego in the back door and abandons all the gains provided by autonomous spaces. So we need to resist this response. Instead, we need to be prepared to say “no” or tell people to fuck off, and also to fight back if necessary. In the TOTW case: isn't it pretty easy to say “no” or “fuck off” to someone who's presumably wheelchair-bound and can't use much physical force? (BTW: the ability to use disability labels to get out of conforming to norms has been massively corroded lately – by right-wing bigots, cybernetic managerialism, and idpol alike. The result is that people who can't or won't inhibit or conform in the socially-demanded ways are either criminalised, or pushed out of social life. This should be irrelevant in anarchist spaces, because anarchist spaces shouldn't be expecting people to conform to norms to begin with – whether they're disabled or not. Thanks for ruining this, idpols – I'll remember it next time I hear idpols pretending to speak for people with disabilities).

This doesn't mean any of us have to have equal affinity for everyone else... but it places limits on the “moves” available to deal with people we don't have affinity with (no superego-type responses). This is a bit anomalous because I'm effectively using an internal inhibition on superego to create conditions for disinhibition. Not a perfect solution, but the best I've come up with.

OK, so language. There are different kinds of words, which “do” different things – and their usefulness as labels is different.

Referential words: most words are ways of dividing up reality. They put things in boxes which don't necessarily have moral significance, but which have descriptive and practical significance (chairs are for sitting on, dogs can bite, etc). Now, there are people – poststructuralists like Derrida for instance, and also Zerzan – who think that even this kind of language is dangerously “labelling”. And there's a sense in which this is true. Not wanting to get all Emile on you... but reality is a continuum, individual entities within it are both interconnected and unique, and the categories into which people divide it up are thus in a certain sense arbitrary. There's a danger in assuming that a dog is JUST a dog, a chair is JUST a chair, a paraplegic is JUST a paraplegic, an anarchist is JUST an anarchist. There's always individual uniqueness, and situational relations which are not captured by the label. And there's plenty of evidence that people DO overidentify with labels, and thus reduce their individuality to categories (“spooks”); and that people do this to other people, and it provides a self-fulfilling prophecy (see Labelling Theory/Deviance Amplification; Fanon on black identity; and material dealing with feminist CR). I'd say it's COMPARATIVELY harmless to use and identify with referential categories in spite of these problems, as long as we're aware of its limits. In Stirner's terms: each person is a unique-one, and the labels are each attributes which are their “possessions” (partial aspects not essences).

Boo/hurrah-words or snarl/purr words: pretty much mean nothing, besides expressing an emotional or moral reaction. Hayakawa (of the General Semantics group) says they're equivalent to an animal snarling/purring. You'll find these a LOT in political rhetoric, especially populist rhetoric (e.g. alt-right, Third Way, idpol). Examples: “cuck”, “asshole”, “woke”, “based”. Words with definite meanings can also be made vague enough to be brought into this category. Idpols disguised as anarchists tend to turn “anarchist” into a purr-word, along with “radical”, “progressive”, “ethical”, etc. We need to watch out for these, and not identify with them too strongly. Uninhibited humans may well snarl and purr a lot, but it's important to differentiate this from conceptual language.

Loaded language: this is the trickiest to deal with, because it combines a referential content with a boo/hurrah/snarl/purr. For example, a racial slur combines a descriptive designation with an expression of contempt. Similarly, calling someone a “criminal” is both descriptive (they engage in such-and-such illegal action) and moral/emotional. So how to handle these? Identify with them and flip the emotional meaning? Try to turn them into simple descriptive terms? Replace them with other terms which don't have the same loading? … Take the example of the word “primitive”. It's a loaded descriptor which means both (descriptively) “person/society/group of a low-tech type” (or with other particular features – localised, stateless, animist, without money or cities or formal writing, etc) and morally-loaded “inferior, more basic, less advanced”, sometimes with overtones of “brutal/violent”, “animal/ape-like” or “unevolved, out-of-date, historical relic”. An anarchist might want to talk about social groups of this descriptive set, without the moral loading. The primitivists keep the word, but flip the emotional meaning. Whereas idpols and pomos effectively ban the word, and replace it with “Indigenous” as an identity-designator (often capitalised, because they think identities are definitive). Personally I tend to avoid words which carry a type of politics/judgement I don't like. But I also tend to avoid vague words if I can. And I'm also very aware of the “euphemism treadmill” and the exclusionary effects of “PC” language-policing. I usually use “indigenous” (without the capital, because I'm referring to a descriptive type of social group and not an identity), and use it interchangeably with “primitive” when dealing with older or primitivist works. I also use loaded words (like “pig”), but I try to avoid using ones which don't accord with my ethos.

I was around for the Anarchy Bang podcast this week and I rather like the idea of separating objective and subjective aspects of language.