anarchists, nihilists, and outlaws recording and writing for our own entertainment
The moon is missing from the sky. It’s dark. You’re running through the woods, as fast as you can, willing yourself more than anything not to trip. Don’t fall, don’t stop, don’t take that split second to look and see if it’s still behind you – it is. You’re being chased. It wants you.
“Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living – because cognition gives them more than they can carry?” asks Peter Wessel Zapffe in his 1933 essay, “The Last Messiah.” For him, the cosmic panic he saw endemic to the capacity for meaning-making burdened his species with a perpetual psychic scramble to avoid absorption into the infinite regression which under girds that capacity. For anarchists, the whole of the world as it is faces them with similarly unthinkable problems whose sheer magnitude, complexity, or both render them as in fact meaningless by dint of scopes in excess of the capacity for a given brain to cognize them, terminating thought into impermeably blank anagnorisis. Having achieved a state of no mind, only those with suitable religious inclinations bother remaining here for long.
“So much as I have been able to put together the pieces of the universe in my small head, there is no absolute right or wrong; there is only a relativity, depending on the consciously though very slowly altering condition of a social race in respect to the rest of the world. Right and wrong are social conceptions: mind, I do not say human conceptions. The names “right” and “wrong,” truly, are of human invention only; but the conception “right” and “wrong,” dimly or clearly, has been wrought out with more or less effectiveness by all intelligent social beings. And the definition of Right, as sealed and approved by the successful conduct of social beings, is: That mode of behavior which best serves the growing need of that society.”
Free Radical Radio is back after a brief unplanned break. Today we bring you four recordings of essays out of Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire, Armed issue #64, released at the end of 2007. That and some of my thoughts around it here.
These four essays were the reading for one week of the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group, which meets every Tuesday, 8pm at The Long Haul in Berkeley (come!). Most of us here at Free Radical Radio have gone to the group a number of times, picking fights and making friends.
Today we bring two pieces of audio relating to John Zerzan!
First, a recording of his essay Second-Best Life: Real Virtuality.
Second, a clip of one of Free Radical Radio’s favorite moments in John Zerzan’s weekly radio show Anarchy Radio: a caller named Greg.
“In these regions, you may observe Man in his constitutionally vicious, instinctively evil and studiously ferocious form – in a word, in the closest possible harmony with the natural world.” — The King
Angela Carter’s Count is back, but not for long. In this chapter, his tempestuous will faces difficult challenges – slavery imposed by the law, chaotic nature, and finally, his mirrored self (and only one of those even has a chance of bringing about his demise).
In “The Realm Where Moral Judgement is Suspended” Milan Kundera writes that “If I were asked the most common cause of misunderstanding between my readers and me, I would not hesitate: humor.” There are books that make us laugh and books that make us laugh at ourselves, and I prefer the ones that do both. In The Infernal Desire Machines of Dr. Hoffman Angela Carter carries a dark laughter as the current flowing beneath the wild seas of her imagination and machinations. To actually read we must suspend moral judgement, we must suspend our notion of reality, and open ourselves to the possible.
We continue with our Individualists Tending Toward The Wild recording series with communiques 5, 6, and 7.
Some interesting nuggets, of which there are many:
I once got into an argument at the anarchist study group in Berkeley, CA about where our anarchy came from. As I usually do, I loudly proclaimed that all anarchy means to me is “No!” and nothing else. To some at the group, this seemed an immature and childish sentiment, reminiscent of Crimethinc. and reeking of anti-intellectualism. Some shared their displeasure at this claim of mine, while some sat silently, as they usually do at the study group, being voyeurs, being takers, giving none of their energy or effort and absorbing(or not) the work others do in attempting to explain their thoughts and feelings.
Work dominates most of our lives… so much so that even when we’re able to escape from our employers, we often re-create its logic by working towards a revolution, or some other abstract ideal of the future.
So take a break from your work, from your future, and enjoy this short recording featuring scintillating musical interludes and an exotic accent for your aural pleasure.