UTOPIAN CONSIDERATIONS(1) : Pirate Utopias
INTENTION SETTING;
I’m thinking about actually setting up an intention for this work of writing i’m doing. Picking a direction for my will.
Direction implies a strategy for how to write. Towards what and through what.
I don’t think this is something I can just manifest recklessly, I have to think about the implications of setting up a trajectory for myself. I have to think of what the means of writing leads towards, what writing and how writing can help.
I’ve somewhat set up an intention for this newsletter before, in fact it’s litteraly the title of the first I ever sent.
But I feel like this first intention was hidden all along, in the structure, in the themes I covered, How I covered them. The why of it all wasn’t explicit to myself, how could I formulate it to others effectively ? And even in that “Statement of Intent” I understood that I could not know what the newsletter would be until I actually started writing it.
We learn through experience, not prediction.
Even with a plan, unknowns foster.
But I’ve been lost long enough to know that a map can be a good friend.
So this is not me outright setting up an intention, this is me reflecting on setting up one, listing what is needed to figure out what I already have.
This might seem skittish but the projects we start are things to be afraid of, what we do makes us, it’s important to plan in advance… of a plan.
Previously in world history :
Like all ego-inflated revolutionaries, radicals and proles of all eras, we feel like we’re living through times of both uncalculable opportunity and apocalypticaly stupid danger.
I don’t think I need to point at the unfolding problems of Now, if you’re reading this you probably already have enough abyss to fill your gaze.
On that note we’re starting from decay.
Decay of state power, infrastructure, liberal hegemony, the rot of so-called welfare states around the world as authoritarian rule reinforces its chokehold on the rights we’ve been afforded by previous comrades’ attempts at improving the People’s lives.
Personally, I was born near the “end of history”, when narratives were being weaved and ripped, when alliances dried out and people looked for certainty. I was born near the millenium when fears of a big-data-bang brought people to pray to unchristian gods and turn to hypercapitalism and technology for rapture.
I was born in societies already deeply entrenched in their mad assault on everything that exists.
If I came to this world unmarked it wasn’t for long, i’m not special in that regard. What has been lost won’t be recovered, no one is coming to save us.
On that cheery note, today I want to think and talk about utopia(this is the second part of a distraction btw, you should probably read the first part if you haven’t already.).
Though I try and generate a utopian impulse within me, I won’t be making any recipes for the cookshops of the future as Marx put it, this is not a program of what will most definitely emerge, this is a drawing out of patterns and a set of speculations for what might be.
Once again and as always : this is not a manifesto, this is not a premonition either.
First as Description, Then as Prescription. No jokes.
Futurism. There’s describing what can happen, there’s describing what will happen and there’s deciding and imposing on what should happen.
All of these are tied together but shouldn’t be confused and blurred, except as propaganda attempting to convince other people of what should be.
A famous attempt and success of blurring these is the cultural moment named by Mark Fisher capitalist realism : an ideological corset that restricts the movement of thoughts and reorients all desires towards capitalism. In other words capitalist realism informs people about what “can and will happen” so as to impose a singular vision of what should happen : there’s no other alternative but this specific economic (and therefore social) system, tomorrow will be today but with better wifi, etc. For Capitalist Realism, the future can only offer us a higher quality version of what currently exists, nothing truly new.
From descriptions of the future, we draw out prescriptions, either implied or expressed: how we describe Now reveals how we think about our future and what it should be, either as optimists, pessimists, resigned souls or enraged bodies; the first step towards a blueprint is to draw out a map and an inventory.
Case in point, the Past MapMakers known as the italian futurists :
“Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man. “ - Futurist Manifesto, 1909
Marinetti’s proudly and knowingly antropo-phallocentric futurism that sees the future not as a place but as an activity understands the intensity at the base of its project and the fact that stability is neither a guarantee nor a perfect state established by the Powers that Be.
It understands that there’s no end to the Future, that tomorrow requires continuous process to be brought about, the problem is that it bases and extends its insight not just in Anthropocentrism but also in the assumption that War generates progress and growth and that War is therefore both inevitable and moral.
It’s always interesting to see fascists make genuinely interesting insights coexist with the most idiotic positions. (also futurist poetry is really lame.)
Here, it’s true that the processual nature of “futuremaking” (also known as living in a society) requires seemingly endless activity but marinetti and his cohort of bike-hating futurists devise their role not as gardeners of possibilities or even as urbanists or designers but as missiles builders and torpedo wielding poets, their vision is of continual destruction leaving space for the establishment of something else.
In that sense, they’re fascists spacemakers ; they call for the digging of gaps and empty spaces where before there was “the womanly and the moralising”, they want to move fast and break things, with the underlying premise that there will be something else to build afterwards.
Not just a war of all against all but almost.
From this idea that War is a moral imperative, italian futurists created a perfect launching pad for the hungry missile known today as classic military fascism, no accident there : Marinetti funded a futurist-fascist party, had a hand in the 1919 Fascist Manifesto and, as an active pro-war activist, enlisted in the italian army after having established himself in the italian arts scene.
“We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.“
An adolescent bravado that betrays a fear to look in the rearview mirror and realize that in fact they’re not the first rebels to fail a revolution, they called for a burial of “mythologies and myths” but all they managed to do was build more legends, more ideas cloaked in images.
They anticipated with ecstasy the flash of crashes and even if they considered the possibility of being rightful and glorious victims of the flames, they couldn’t face their own flesh being ripped apart by the futureshock.
Emotionally raw and unfocused sensations elevated to the rank of stylistic movement, it still captures one important component of art as representation of the internal dynamics that agitate the human spirit and the elevation of Intensity(emotional, physical etc.) as something worth exploring but the fact that italian futurists were all men of the same social circle obviously restricts their grasp and approach of the “Human Spirit” to a certain set of emotional responses and moralistic positions (though they desperately tried to portray themselves as rebellious antimoralists hungry for unknown sensations).
The rejection of the past in favor of a boundless future, either as a new territory to conquer or as a Long Now, a perpetual present of Speed : that’s what italian futurism offered and called for, a view of what the future has to offer that will be familiar to anyone who pays/paid attention to VC discourse, start-up culture, silicon valley drama or Big Tech™️ in general.
Yes, that’s why I’m troubling you with these old dead men : silicon valley slander.
Ultimately, the italian futurist art movement is a good exemple of what futurism can be : description as a prerequisite to prescription.
In paying attention only to the Man, the libidinal and the war-envy, the fascistic hunger at eating and shitting out the other, in paying attention to all of this, the artists make up the map on which they base their blueprint for the Future.
“The future should look like my dreams and how I felt when I was snorting a lot of cocaine and driving my car down a country road” : what these men dreamed of was war and steel and machinery squashing human bodies under the heat and speed of tomorrow.
The problem was not dreaming in itself but their dreams, obviously. Or rather, which dreams they were ready to share with the world and what they sought these dreams to become.
I want to dream too, I don’t pretend my dreams can transform the world entire, but I want to dream better things, I also want a bit of levity.
That said :
AN INCOMPLETE AND OBVIOUSLY BIASED LISTING OF ACTIVE ANARCHIST TENDENCIES IN THE MAINLAND FRENCH LEFT :
Tendencies attract and attach themselves and big currents can be identified out of the visible French libertarian left, here’s what I gathered :
anarcho-syndicalist and generally work-oriented organizing efforts :
People who seek to organise collective power in and through the workplace, on the basis of workers’ self managment, horizontalism, federative efforts and rotational revocable mandates. All of that with generally the communistic ownership of the means of production as the ideal and goal. “Freeing the realm of work from the tyranny of the wage-relation and hierarchy, etc”
Then you have
Insurrectionalist, anti or post-civilisation anarchisms :
People who organise in small autonomous groups or as individuals, with a lot of individualist or egoist inspired notions of anarchism. All insurrectionalists are not anticivilisation and there are nuances between anti and post civilisationists but the latter definitely see the end of our current mode of production/social-relation as either inevitable or desirable. Most argue for insurrection.
Then you have
Autonomist efforts:
Which center their attention around what makes one vulnerable and how to prepare for the everyday and the future, not in the area of work and the proletariat but at the general level of locality, more interested in direct spatial localisation rather than the shifting notion of a worker, more interested in making sure you can get food and shelter rather than focusing on your advantages and position as a worker.
Then you have
Platformist or base-building/especifismo anarchisms and Synthesists approaches :
The two/three main strands of anarchist mass organisation.
Platformists seek to have a unity of theory and practices so as to both grow in number and in action, Synthesists seek to have a diversity of theory and practices so as to grow first in number and then in activity.
Basebuilders and especifists take an approach similar to platformism but look more specifically to the establishment of bases in neighborhoods so as to insert both ressources and narratives into them, it follows the propaganda by the deed praxis of doing things while saying you’re an anarchist so that people associate anarchism to the thing. Notorious example: The F.O.B.
Then you have
Communalist or Municipalist efforts:
People who seek to go back to the collective assemblies model of decision making and generally views itself as a third position between marxist organising and anarchist organising.
Basically, the idea is to have a network of inter-related autonomous communes operating along the lines of horizontal collective assemblies, decision making on the local level doesn’t rely on a state and decision making on the larger scale is dealt with through a commune of communes : the different localities have a dialogue about how to best handle ressources, problems, what needs to be done. Rather than the workers, it’s the citizen who is the revolutionary subject.
This doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list by any means, if anyone feels they have a better grasp of the french context or have things to add, I’d be glad to correct this exposé.
Also : these are not the only currents of anarchism and the tendencies within each aren’t necessarily opposable or incapable or assembling and influencing each others, on the contrary, but I draw two distinct movement and intentions from these :
The attempts at invading the Structures in place, sometimes close to the Revolutionary Reformism of André Gorz who posited the possibility of going beyond the leftist “revolution or reform” divide by simply getting inside current institutions and apparatuses and pushing out or eliminating other ideological presences (not necessarily through violent means) with the intent of changing the internal dynamics of these structures and apparatuses, effectively changing something from the inside. A mass-oriented, Work-related effort towards reclaiming presence and power over one’s own (collective) condition.
and
The attempt at building infrastructure and structures outside of the Structures in place, with the goal of generating hubs of counter-power ; building material power outside the reach of State and Capital.
Both are targets of state and capital because they’re both strategies for toppling them. Both can work alongside(and generally have) but may end up generating oppositional currents within anarchist local and national scenes. This is the stuff splits and schisms are made of : A platformist organisation could technically have both basebuilders and syndicalists in its midst, trying to coalesce power in their own way but still helping each others out but if there’s no dialogue between the two tendencies, differing simultaneous actions could stumble on one another, effectively sabotaging each others in trying to get to their respective objectives. The most simple exemple would be coordinating events so that workers don’t have to choose between one or the other.
Something that is considered true and obvious by most is that collective action is more efficient than individual action, or rather “many people doing thing A” has more impact than “a single person doing thing A”. What’s not agreed upon is the way in which “many people doing thing A” need to be organized, or even if they should be.
That’s where divisions and sects occur.
From these divisions you’ll get a bit of social distancing, so for instance a syndicalist march that aims to peacefully demonstrate the strenght and number of the unions within the context of a strike can be hijacked by insurrectionalists who want to create a riot and see an opportunity in the sheer number of people out in the street at that moment.
A frequent catchphrase relating to sectarianism is that it’s necessary to “maintain a diversity of tactics”, the underlying idea being that number is more important than cohesion. The problem with that attitude is that at best if people can’t agree on what’s wrong, it will be very difficult to enact change effectively, at worst these words are used by people who refuse to admit that there’s been fault and bad judgement at the base of an action.
It’s very important to see the complex ways tactics and strategies relate in political practice. It’s not that anything and everything should be done at any time regardless of what others do but that different practices and different ideologies should be in dialogue with one another. (Ecology of tactics.)
In fact, all tendencies I list above can lead towards each others or exist on top of one another :
Autonomism could work with or towards Communalism: >build a social center with other comrades, a place where people can get or grant ressources(access to internet, healthcare, information, etc), a place that helps entertain social bonds and thus a materialistic sense community, if the community is localised close enough to that social center then comrades who hail from the social center can use that to foster in local politics and either get a comrade elected to mayor’s office, or organise collective citizen’s assemblies (depending on the local regulation).
Syndicalism can do the same if the work-environment is concentrated enough on a single location : imagine a mining community with heavy union presence but no support from elected officials, repeat the same as above and you effectively have an injection of syndicalists into structures of institutional power who can shift the powerbalance in favor of workers.
This is where, in another kind of text, I’d put a long paragraph explaining that yes libertarian municipalism and communalism are frought with risks given that they suggest potentially electing comrades in positions of state-power, therefore running the risk of making them enemies, but I’m too lazy and as I said this is not a manifesto. This is ponderings.
From this strange mesh different tendencies feed off, on and into I can see also the potential for simple human dialogue, though at the same time one should be careful not to just meld the militant scene as a stew and hope a good meal comes out of it. Now these are suppositions and I’m largely a newbie to this so I’m open to being proven wrong.
One thing I’ve also been thinking about is the fact that we already have infrastructure and technology that can be used and harnassed to our ends, the question as always is can the means accord themselves to the ends we seek? In other words, are the tools we’re using (and that use us in return) adapted to what we want to accomplish ?
Yet again, I’m thinking here about the specific design of much of social media but also about the way public transport is currently implemented in much urban and rural areas, about healthcare infrastructure, etc.
All the things which allow our current lives to keep going as usual, for better or worse. Most of them designed, willfully or not, as devices of social isolation and cohersion.
This doesn’t come from technology itself as a concept obviously but from the specific context in which it’s realized : Buses with plethora individual seats adapted to a specific bodytype, some seats adapted to mobility impaired people, maybe indications in braille for visually impaired people. The bus is designed with the normative individual body in mind, the unit, to which some modifications are added to make space to “special users”. The idea is not that people will use it, the idea is that a lot of individual persons will use it and within this structural context there are other dynamics of social atomization that come to reinforce the utter loneliness of taking the bus to go to work.
Looking at social media, this notion of design with the unit in mind also comes with the specific feeling of being a small something in a bigger something, everybody is the protagonist of their own story, yada yada.
Which makes the rapid-fire temporality of catastrophic news even more impacting : What can I do about these deaths over there? I’m just me. All I can do is post about it and hope others will see and retweet it, for awareness.
It’s not either that social media is a conspiracy to make people more alone, more that the effect of trying to “maximize user engagement” is not just more users clicking faster on more things, it’s also heightening the stress levels of these users, fostering the hunger for visibility and recognition and other very human emotions, intensified and focused.
Twitter is a platform, not just a tool.
Where tools are the expansion of capacities in the shape of objects (hammer= smash better than fist // knife = cut better than teeth // screwdriver = you get the idea), platforms are a soil and space for the emerging and structuring of tools and relations.
Different platforms are created with different methods and ends in mind and will therefore produce different results but it’s also important to point out that platforms are not static or isolated from the world. They move or freeze in conjunction with it. Tumblr was a mess, a platform that didn’t concern itself with a specific brand or user-target and therefore let niches foster, an hybrid picture/text centric platform where the reblog/response function meant that the primary way of initating conversation was necessarily a form of correspondance, it was also a platform where queer folks could find memes about their favorite webcomics, advices on how to wear a binder or how to tuck properly or just find porn that wasn’t held by a monopoly.
Not to say it was perfect, it had its share of stupid drama and also its share of horrible things but its temporality was different from others, its group-creation and niche-creation was different from facebook or twitter because its team didn’t really give a shit about optimization, it attracted different people, different tones.
That’s not to mean either that people always restrict themselves to a single platform, today is the day of the cross-platforms, for “digital” workers at least.
Twitter for the jokes, instagram for the online store, facebook for family business, tik tok for the memes, etc.
“The street finds its own uses for things.”
The internal dynamics of a platform are not necessarily open for modification by the users, though any collective and organised behavior will necessarily affect the platform regardless of intention. At the end of the day, can you harness the means of one platform to make it do what you want ?
Or would it be safer to go indie, make a scuttlebutt or a mastodon instance ?
Apart from people whose job depends on all the big platforms, I refuse to believe the enduring influence of the big social media industry doesn’t have something to do with addiction and utter loneliness.
Not addiction to any particular thing, addiction to stimulation and simulation, the old circular thing of platforms that don’t attract users anymore: why doesn’t anybody go to mastodon? because nobody is on mastodon, why is there nobody on mastodon? because nothing happens there. why does nothing happen there? because nobody new goes there, why d…
A lot of these platfoms I despise are generally built to reinforce the idea that you’re an individual who hasn’t reached out yet. You’re plankton in a sea of potential connections and conversations and you need to be seen and heard and accrue mass, which constrats for instance with the way forums and chatrooms operate where conversations are “rooms” rather than events. You’re in a specific, sectioned space and you can talk in real-time with the rest of the users who’re in the same room and generally you can see if others are present or active.
Even if tone is not always explicit, there’s some indicators for how people are receiving what you’re saying and there’s more capacity for moderation given that the mods (who are also users) in the chat are not responsible for a thousand of chats. (except if they impose that on themselves) : Users self-moderation.
“liking” someone’s comment in a chat or on a forum is generally less intuitive and feels less obvious than on twitter facebook or instagram, the “engagement” of users with each others will manifest in different ways (also, depending on what other platforms they’re used to, they might transport the markers of engagement of these other platforms to the ones they aren’t used to, or just started using: heavy image use instead of heavy text use for instance, writing blocks of text rather than short sentences, etc).
All of this is very complex and chemically unstable, once again, why not just build a platform with your own ideological tenets built into it? Why not start a pirate radio ?
Why not start your own shit ?
“MOVE QUIETLY AND BLOW UP SHIT”?
So I talked a lot about utopias and utopian impulse in the previous newsletter but people might not be certain they have the same definition as I do. I did point out that I wouldn’t talk about falseutopias, places which are supposed to be perfect societies but reveal themselves to actually be horrible, I’m sure you can think up a few.
One of the notions of utopia that I find interesting(thanks for the rec, Musubi !) is formulated by Ernst Bloch where he points out that Thomas More’s Utopia, as a physical place that one can go to, creates the fact that utopia is not where we are but where we can go, Utopia exists as Not-Here, rather than a No-place like it’s etymological root.
He does clarify that this is not to say you should book a plane to Utopia, Kansas, rather that a place is set up in the future, as a potential, as an ideal.
I personally see this notion of Utopia not as a definite space but rather a set of distributed potentials waiting to erupt, this is akin to solarpunk’s pockets of joyful futurity though its aesthetic markers are less definite and more open to interpretation.
The place you find yourself in is not a finished and complete moment, something is missing. As all processes it doesn’t exist isolated from the world but as both constitutive and enactor of it.
The Utopia is an image of things to come, a “not-here rather than no-place”.
Adding to this Leguin’s idiom (from her ambiguous utopia) that a journey is always about coming home :
“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”
In merging these two together, you get the impression that utopia might be about (re)building the home, then ?
The recurrence of something that needs to be built (again). Not a return to something that decays but the re-emergence of a pattern that was, I don’t know all of this is very vague, isn’t it ?
This is the realm of ideas, after all.
There’s a circular pattern to a lot of utopias: Thomas more’s Utopia as a round island, the round thingy-buildings in that one novel, there’s always this idea of utopias as self-contained, self-revolving, self-generating-consuming spaces, there’s also the notion of the rest of the world not being there when we focus on utopias. Utopias exist as divine self-oriented sometimes static constructs that obscure their own history besides some miraculous figure, project or event, the center. They’re immaculate, a-historical, post-political. (or rather images born of the political rather than actual depictions of the world.)
That’s one of the things that generally make people reject utopias, their seemingly ahistorical existence, spaces that emerge out of themselves rather than as result of historical continuation, we know history has no end but utopias seem to argue otherwise.
The Why of utopias is that they’re visualizations, not actually existing societies, to think that the Ideal World, or Endpoint of society can ever be reached is delusional. (And I’d argue, a lot of people try and create an image for their goal that they deem to be “achievable” because they always see a true ideal as a deception, an horizon you never reach, they don’t understand that utopian images are not about linear 1=>2 sequences or result-based operations, this is about process.)
Then, if we are to effectively think utopia, we should start from the knowledge that there’s no blank slate and that nothing is ever truly finished. There’s no final stage, the only thing that awaits us at the end is death. Because what truly mattered was the process in the end.
(if your income is above 1000 euros a month don’t talk to me about technologically enabled immortality please. Yes I’m a richist.)
What we need is to repair a world we didn’t know existed while preparing for the one currently piercing through the neoliberal veil.
Collapse is here, there’s no bargaining it.
There are pockets of the world of After we need here and there, what is necessary is more than bridges between them, we need to make these pockets errupt to the surface.
Inhabit seems to inhabit
that space of hinting at utopian longings for the world of After while seriously considering the material conditions brought about by climate change, decaying state-power, capitalist-chokehold, patriarchal exhaustion and fascist uprisings. The collective cleverly hints at possibilities without pinpointing the exact shape of the world of After. They know prediction is for grifters. I applaud that.
This is why I’m not predicting, nor making bets.
Simply identifying trends.
Like the anarchist tendencies I talked about way above, futures as I/we visualize them are not definite blueprints but tendencies, trends and dynamics: they overlap, intersect and coexist. There’s not one future that is definitely going to happen, rather there will be a myriad of futures eating at each others and intensifying or squashing one another.
I’m trying real hard not to name this the ecology of futures, I sense that in the coming months it’s going to be The buzzword of thinkpieces on interrelationality. (That and “emergence”.)
Pirate Utopia: I will not be talking about Peter Lamborn Wilson.
I do take interest in this combination of words, the society of rogues, the metropolis of criminals, the utopia of pirates. One doesn’t even need to read the account of the author to get an idea of what that’d look like, lively chaos, moral panic, all of that. [insert still from pirate of the carribeans], lumpenproletariat vacation. That’s all well and nice but I’m not thinking about sealion aesthetics.
I’m obviously not advocating for violent uprising either, this is all speculation and theory fun.
The pirate Utopia is the place at the periphery, a bubble of horizontalism and self-organisation.
Thriving on illegalist efforts, a parasite on the back of a bigger tick, it creates an area where state control and state provision is outran, outmanoeuvred by the pirates and their accomplices.
As all ideals, the pirate utopia necessarily exists as glimpses, it haunts spaces of autonomy, it’s not reached only intuited; it suggests the possibility of a life out of the reach of the state.
Insular or isolationist nation-states can’t always be fully effective at repressing parcel-like formations : in such assymetrical conflicts, there’s not a single head to chop off, every destruction of hubs is spreading its inhabitants in other communities where they’ll get back to work at amassing collective power and building autonomy.
In the 90s, the pirate utopia seemed to make itself seen in the growing presence of communication and simulation technologies. Internet shit.
File-sharing, illegal online libraries, compendiums of human knowledge that could not be effectively monetized because of the volatile spread of their model, no competition to be had if everything is free.
The new counter culture incarnated through the Cyber, running parallel to singularitionist beliefs of post-politics, post-humanity. This was idealistic, ironically.
Letting technologies of information be implemented through corporate infrastructure was one of the errors(?) of tech-hippie-libertarians. They tried to get their utopia the easy way but the means of capitalism have very low chances of giving you something that’s not just more capitalism.
This was the time when the USA college => industry pipeline got hijacked and you could go to UCB or MIT for a few years and then go help a commune set up its water-supply infrastructure.
Escapism took over, unfortunately. Where there was potential for growing autonomy and organising collectivities, a lot of people saw a vacation or even better : a new market.
This is not to say that the vision has disappeared, just that it’s been forgotten in some places where it was the most potent.
I argue Pirate Utopianism lies dormant in current initiatives and that we can already see pockets of autonomy revealing themselves, Autonomist spaces, platforms for new social relations. Queer or lgbtia social centers with easy-access to contraception and testing, mental health ressources, neighborhood-kitchen-garden, public worshops and markerspaces that don’t have exorbitant entry prices(they exist!), street libraries/book-depots.
Pirate Utopianism as a vision on the compass of insurrectionary autonomists. Or communalists, or based-builders, who knows as long as it can help.
PART 2 of the Distraction, is it the last? I don’t know but it’s receding a bit in the back of my head, for now. Have you heard about that covid19 virus? Crazy, right ? Real-time collapse for the USA. Line goes down, all of that. Interesting times, they’ll be the death of me.
Find the others, folks.