from anon

The Condensed and Cutting Clarity of the Campaign to Play for Keeps

Invisible Generation: Rants, Polemics and Critical Theory Against the Planetary Work Machine. Jason Rodgers. Autonomedia. 2021.

Art is only bearable bearing witness against itself, Jason quotes me as saying in this refulgent collection of 33 essays and 27 flyers, but then her project Campaign to Play for Keeps was one of the publishers of my essay Anarchist Adventures in Wordlessland which began, “Anarchism may be beautiful in practice, but in theory it doesn’t work. It certainly doesn’t work wonders.”

One can only wonder, then, at the delight delivered by this demonstration of wor(l)d play undermining wor(l)d processing. Invisible Generation is anarchism for thinkers, not just readers and writers.

The flyers here display a command of critical aesthetics; the essays manifest a mastery of critical discourse. Wit is used as a whip—literally: “Anarchy remains ungovernable, even by you self-declared revolutionaries. Emma Goldman would be seizing her horsewhip, if she could see you now!”

We don’t need to read our way into anarchy! Sure, Jason names names, but her name-calling (Right-Wing Nihilists, Digital Maoists, Pro-Promothean Countercultures, the Military-Entertainment Complex, Insurrections of Imaginations, the Jihad of the Marginal Mosquitoes, Semiocapitalism, Psychic Nomads, Coolhunters, Black (Magick) Blocs, Perpetual Psy-Ops Paranoia Engines and Dream Webs are illuminated elegantly in these pages) matters because she recognizes that “the way that can be named is not the unfailing way,” as the Tao te Ching puts it. As she puts it, “Language was probably always a tool of oppression. Certainly writing seemed to have filled this function, during the transition from cultures of orality to one based on literacy.”

Invisible Generation serves a contrary function, that of assisting transition from a culture of literacy to ones based on orality. Already, the dominant form of expression is advertising. A very limited combination of elements—namely, a striking graphic, some text, and lots of white space—possess remarkable motivational potency. (The absence of white space in the flyers here is a dissonant element that glaringly illustrates in a graphic way the absence of silence and solitude in a world where text and image encroach on all voids.)

Anarchism has long been damaged by a one-sided embrace of straightforward explication in long-form essays. As socialists have been rendered null and void by their inability to critique technology, anarchists have been similarly reduced by their inability to critique language.

My house shall be called a House of Bedlam, but they have made it a den of books. They would turn the mighty torrent of anarchy into a brackish backwater in which to paddle about in essays.

And yet . . . and still . . . some of us seek deeper, colder streams in which to sport about. . . .
Invisible Generation is such a stream.

Lang Gore
Riddle Management

Comments

@balm (not verified) Thu, 09/15/2022 - 15:18

i tried to find more details about this book but it doesn't seem to appear on autonomedia's site. but really i do not need more books so no problem.

anon (not verified) Fri, 09/16/2022 - 18:40

In reply to by anon (not verified)

Which name? Jason Rodgers or Lang Gore? Also, that's a pretty funny joke since I know all three of them (only saw Bekken once a long time ago, and he is notoriously unfunny).

anon (not verified) Sat, 09/17/2022 - 20:52

In reply to by Jon Bekken (not verified)

I'm a lawyer so I know what's what. Go ahead and sue me, Suzy.

Soo-wee!

--- Bob Black (pig ffffucker and understudy for the Purple Monster)

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