Gorges, Falls and Streams @walmas - Tumblr Blog

WAR IN THE STREETS - TACTICAL LESSONS FROM THE GLOBAL CIVIL WAR (Vol. 1)

READ / PRINT

from the Preface: “The idea for this zine was to collect a series of situated and intelligent reflections on black blocs, street clashes and related tactics of confrontation. Each of the texts collected here tries to spell out in concrete ways what seems like it has worked and what hasn’t, while trying to be clear about how each tactic relates to the larger insurrectional process. Given the current US climate of increasingly open social hostility and the more ‘mass’ nature of some of the rage already foreseeable in the coming years, the time seemed right to assemble a few strategic pathmarks to help us orient and operate effectively on shifting sands.”

CONTENTS:

-“Plan B— Our Exit Strategy from Activism and the Next Expression of an Autonomous Social Force”, Liam Sionnach (2009) -“Signals of Disorder: Sowing Anarchy in the Metropolis”, AG Schwarz (2010) -“The Riot or the Attack? Solidarity and questions for US Anarchists after May Day”, AG Schwarz (2011) -“Yes, And: Results from the North American Contagious Antagonisms Inquiry” North American Society for the Advancement of Criminal Science (2012) -“Reflections on Violence”, Lundimatin, 2016 -“Build the Hacienda, Burn Down the Palaces”, Lundimatin, 2016. -“The Unassignable Riot”, Lundimatin, 2016.

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Atmospheres can … become techniques for making spaces available for some bodies, and keeping others out: how better to exclude people than by inviting them in but making them uncomfortable. Then if they leave it appears they do so in accordance with their own will. Comfort becomes a form of emotional work as well as diversity work: to stay you might have to work hard to make others comfortable with the mere fact of your existence.

Sara Ahmed, “Queer Angles” (via coocoolah)

friendship-as-a-form-of-life

(Read // Print)

<3.

ill-will-editions

A Letter to Our American Cousins - Lundimatin

The following letter appeared on the French website Lundi.am (Lundimatin) on November 14, 2016. Translated by Ill Will Editions.

Zine version: PRINT / READ

********

Today, rare are those who know still what the State and politics (and thus ‘history’) are, or rather were. -Alexandre Kojeve to Carl Schmitt, June 28, 1955

So yeah, the Joker seized the White House. It wasn’t part of the script. It didn’t take a truck loaded with explosives, and there was no countdown on an LCD screen. He simply showed up to the elections, as democratically as could be, and he won.

The news was greeted with universal incredulity, painful for some, triumphant for others. In this world, for a truth to rise up and present itself is always an event. It is therefore customary to swiftly bury it under dump trucks of “commentary,” “explanation” and other chatter. We dismiss the fact that it happened on the grounds that it should not have happened, that it was an accident. The problem is that, as the accident becomes the rule, as Brexit prevails in the United Kingdom and bloody Duterte in the Philippines, it likewise becomes increasingly difficult to mask the unreality of all that “should have been.” To disqualify as “fascist” the result of procedures that one otherwise considers “democratic” only adds to the dishonesty and aberration.

Let us instead take the presidential election of Donald Trump as a moment of truth. Let us formulate the truths, old or new, that follow from it. Let us look at the reality that arrays itself therein, and take our bearings within it.

1. An election is not a “democratic” procedure. It was practiced in all varieties of monarchical regimes. The Pope is elected. Universal suffrage is a plebiscitary procedure. The plebiscite has always been favored by dictators. The first “democratically elected” President in France was the dictator Louis-Napolean Bonaparte.

2. Dictatorship is an institution, and not the negation of every institution. It was invented by the Roman republic as the most effective means of confronting emergency situations—a pleb secession, for example. If the dictator is granted full powers, it is for the sake of saving the Republic or restoring the “normal situation.” Dictatorship is a republican institution.

3. Politics is essentially the art of manipulating appearances, of subterfuge, strategems, the game of alliance and betrayal, of the permanent coup d’Etat, of bad faith and domination—in short, it is the art of effective lies. What could be more logical than electing a patented liar as president? Those who regard this election as the triumph of a “post-truth politics” simply because the current winner doesn’t “respect the facts” only obscure the obvious, which is that if Donald Trump was elected it was precisely because he embodies the truth of politics, the truth of its lie. The reason why the Left is so roundly detested is that it lies about the lie by attempting to do politics in good faith. Each time that the Left attacks Trump’s obscenities, it only further exposes the smarmy character of its own moralism. The polite restraint of which the Left boasts keeps it at an equally polite distance from the truth, which only prolongs the reign of lies. This helps to explain why some regard Trump as the end of the lie. All that’s missing is for them to read their Gracian, who once wrote of the man of the court that, “when his artifice is seen, his dissimulation reaches a higher pitch, and he tries to deceive by means of truth itself. He changes both his game and his weapons, in order to change his ruse. His artifice is to no longer have one.”

4. If governing today consists principally in the act of enunciating the emergency; if politicians do little more than play their part in a sort of spectacular distraction accessible to all; if they do so only to postpone, day after day, our consideration of the whole range of vital questions whose unresolved state undermines our existence; if the exercise of state power offers nothing but a lure enjoining those who possess real power, because they have real interests in the world, to continue to serve them; if, therefore, government is no longer in the government, if its palaces stand empty; then it is entirely reasonable to elect a professional reality tv star president. A clown is quite simply the best candidate to play the principal role in a clown theater.

5. For as long as “democracy has been in crisis,” experts have lost themselves in superfluous ruminations over “votes of confidence”, “protest votes” and the like. They ought to add one more to their list of bankrupt categories: the “vote of contempt.” It should not be ignored that a whole host of libertarian enemies of government voted for Trump. To place a contemptable being in a role one holds in contempt, to put a grotesque character at the head of a body one takes to be superfluous, is there a more effective way to display its inanity? To elect nothing as president is simply one more way of annhiliating the presidential function. It leaves us at liberty to believe ourselves clever, while deriding the triumph of “idiocracy”.

6. The encounter with the White Man left an enduring memory in some Amerindian people, a memory that was not dispelled even where the people in question were exterminated. According to popular opinion, the White Man is a vulgar being, a senseless, narcissistic liar, a ferocious hypocrite hungry for profit and ignorant of all that surrounds him and for whom nothing is sacred. He is a criminal, a defiler, a nihilist, a moron, and wretch to the point of profusion. By giving themselves a degenerate on the scale of Donald Trump for president of “the Western Hemisphere,” the citizens of the United States have insisted on making this truth a brilliant fact, and for some a blinding one [1].

7. Across the world, the juridico-formal edifice of the State is in the process of being dismantled and replaced by the unique criteria of policework, mainly that of efficacity (which coincides—and not by chance— with the ideal of management). Where ends are lacking, what plausible goal remains other than an infinite intensification of pure means? Soviet-style purges, repression with live ammunition, mass incarceration, the “war on terror,” states of emergency, “immigration politics,” shameless propaganda, the “war on drugs,” paramilitary and citizen massacres, liquidation of opposing forces with no explanation given: what we are seeing is not a “state of exception become the norm,” but a certain mode of governmentality that is spreading at high speed across the world. Duterte, the “Philippino Trump,” who proposes extra-judicial executions in the streets of his country as the measure of effectivity of his politics, and encourages the citizenry to join in the bloodbath with enthusiasm, indicates a path as well as a new paradigm for the exercise of power, one entirely in “transgression.” Obviously, the most unsettling part of the Filipino paradigm is that there are still human rights groups publicly asking themselves if we might not be “exiting the rule of law.”

8. Western civilization has not finished finishing. All this is of a piece with the torture it has inflicted on itself for more than a century, such that even its most fanatical partisans can no longer stand it. Voting for Donald Trump was an immense gesture of “let’s have done with it!”, literally, to prefer a frightening end over an endless fear. A certain Calvinist taste for the apocalypse is expressed here, alongside the properly Western desire for catastrophe—a way of giving in to vertigo, a cessation of self-restraint, a need for a decisive confrontation, or, to put it in theological terms, a rupture of the katechon whose effects will be felt well beyond the United States.

9. Since its birth in Ancient Greece, democracy has worked essentially to ward-off civil war—the civil war that gave birth to it and by which it maintains itself, but also civil war as the ultimate reality of the coexistence between different forms-of-life, human and non-human. From Athens on, external warfare has been the most banal method of warding off this internecine war. It is one of the marks of democracy that it treats its enemies as “enemies of civilization,” as “barbarians,” “monsters,” “criminals,” and more recently as “terrorists”—in short, to eject its enemies from “humanity.” It is this way of conducting war that Trump has “brought back home,” that he has dragged back to the center of classical politics, by treating Hillary Clinton not as an adversary with whom one debates but as a “criminal” to be sent to prison. Thus we see democracy, once again, as the continuation of war by other means. Among distinguished people, it has of late been customary to speak of “pacification” rather than counter-insurrection. This is clearly no longer the case. If democracy is essentially that form of civil war that consists in denying civil war, there are some citizens in the United States who would like for it to visibly appear as what it essentially is. This is one of the first steps taken by democracy in America off the path anticipated by Tocqueville, the precedent for which was, in this sense, Russia.

10. If Trump’s victory appears so plainly as the revenge of those defeated in the American Civil War of the 1860s, the danger is great that, as this event brings into view for many the subterranean continuum of civil war, that it will nonetheless be grasped as a lamentable scourge rather than a fact to be taken on. Beyond the puppet-like character of the United States presidency, this election may still serve as an invitation for vengeance, a carte blanche to the police to slaughter as many Blacks and leftists as they wish. It is always difficult to forgive one’s victims for all the evil one has inflicted upon them. And it is true that the partisans of Trump seem, by and large, to be well-armed. But it is also imaginable that the obvious madness of this new government could bring it face-to-face with a new war of secession [2] along a reversed front, that the illegitimacy of the new powers could nourish an infinite fragmentation of the national territory – an end to the United States of America – where the multiplication of militias would necessitate the multiplication of communes. What is fundamentally ineligible in the character of Donald Trump could, by contact, destroy the function that he is supposed to occupy and the system in which this function is inscribed. The aberration reigning at the center could bring about the end of all centrality. No longer a State, only those territories we pass through and those we avoid. The end of hegemonies. A contamination of every single Western leader by mere contact with Trump: how could we take seriously a head of state who appears to take this Donald seriously? What will come of the administration of things and the government of men when they no longer wear the impersonal mask of the State?

Dear cousins, we send you these thoughts from France as a way of saying you’re not alone, regardless of whatever fate befalls us through our own electoral system over here in a few months.

NOTES

[1] To deepen this intuition, we recommend the little-known article by Georges Devereux, “Schizophrenia: An ethnic psychosis, or schizophrenia without tears”, in G. Devereux (Ed.), Basic Problems of Ethnopsychiatry, 214–236.

[2] French history books typically refer to the American Civil War as a guerre de sécession, or a ‘war of secession’. -Trans.

ithaca-problems

22. Your hair stylist shrugs every time you say you want your usual: “the Amy Goodman.”

walmas

Where I’m Writing These Days

Dear Tumblr, It’s been real good. I remember for a time an immersive obsession with Tumblr. I am now, however, doing the vast majority of my writing and posting over on my website the counterapparatus. The reasons for this are many but it essentially boils down to the fact that I would prefer that my posts are not immediately commodified by Tumblr, that my social media feeds are as autonomous as humanly possible.

Anyways, here are some posts to dip your feet in the water: some small updates re: my body The Spiral Dance and the Commune: Some Reflections on the Eviction of Occupy I want to ––

Towards a Common Wage for the Digital Commons Anti-Bio Labor, Public(ation), Text(ile) Well, hope you stop on by, bookmark the site, add my feed to your RSS reader or otherwise finagle a way to keep track of my writing. Love, s

Where I’m Writing These Days

Anyways, here are some posts to dip your feet in the water: some small updates re: my body The Spiral Dance and the Commune: Some Reflections on the Eviction of Occupy I want to ––

#blogs

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A certain passage from pages 29-30 in my copy of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, full paragraph quoted so I do not forget (emphases mine):

If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the surplus power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given rise to another type of duplication? That of a ‘non-corporal’, a ‘soul’, as Mably called it. The history of this ‘micro-physics’ of the punitive power would then be a genealogy or an element in a genealogy of the modern ‘soul’. Rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished—and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and kowledge extends and reinforces this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

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The woman who checks her makeup half a dozen times a day to see if her foundation has caked or her mascara has run, who worries that the wind or the rain may spoil her hairdo, who looks frequently to see if her stockings have bagged at the ankle or who, feeling fat, monitors everything she eats, has become, just as surely as the inmate of the Panopticon, a self-policing subject, a self committed to a relentless self-surveillance. This self-surveillance is a form of obedience to patriarchy. It is also the reflection in woman’s consciousness of the fact that she is under surveillance in ways that he is not, that whatever else she may become, she is importantly a body designed to please or to excite.

Michel Foucault, “Femininity and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power” (via chocolate-eggs-and-lacan)

Not Foucault lol...

maketotaldeconstruct

Ideology-Bodies

An abstract scheme to apprehend ideology: The world is composed of bodies, or rather body-interactions, that assemble the conditions of possible futures. A given ideology is a material system, with attendant arrangements of bodies. Ideology sits in bodies, in human bodies, in buildings, in space, in technology, in texts, in media, in the “distribution of the sensible”. Ideology is a sense-making apparatus (it is sense made that enacts possible futures) and, as such, is ontologically continuous with it’s “effects” - the barbed wire fence constructs carcereality as much as it is put in place by it.

Ideological matrices are situated within the bodies of people. Ideas are material, they are real associations in conceptual networks: assemblages of language, memory, sensations, media, body-affects, orientations and movement. Systems of legibility, expressibility and action. Ideas, perceptions and judgments require repeated enforcement (micropolitics: the everyday moments of history, of reproduction, of possible intervention); they are constantly constructed anew.

Oppressive and extractive power structures exist as distributed, centerless matrices of such activity, continually oriented and calibrated to an end. A disaffiliated person could do powerful work to advance an ideology in co-alignment with its “legitimate” actors. The Minutemen and other nativist groups produce microborders that fit into a continuum of police activity called the Border. Ideology lives on in vigilantism; the cracks, fissures, refractions and subterranean points of contact aggregate around a system, enable maneuverability. The US security apparatus funds nonstate actors to advance its imperatives. A union leader murdered in Buenaventura, Colombia by gang mercenaries harshly realizes neoliberal doctrine, paving the way for free trade, despite being officially outside the purview of US foreign policy.

Apparatuses of domination, of liberation, of determination are immanent and limitless in form.

An insistent monism: these ideology-bodies, these spheres of affective receptivity and affectivity, are composed of contingent linkages, quivering and ontologically open. It is the work of politics, world-making, to disrut these relations, unbundle them and repackage them in a bricolage of new material-discursive formations. This process takes many forms and is, in fact, many process; it’s all there is.

So, can we speak of an ethics of territorialization? At what point does this process become violence and when is violence acceptable to disentangle existing relations of domination?

maketotaldeconstruct

Fredric Jameson, in his attempt to describe the deterritorialization of the subject under late capitalism, found a corollary in what he deemed ‘postmodern hyperspace’: “ […] this latest mutation in space […] has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment […] can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.” A space that is total, but without clear borders or proper coordinates, something within which one is thoroughly embedded while radically disoriented. Instead of the habitual engagement with architectural form of classical and modern built environments, our subjectifying habitus is disaggregated into a series of gestures, all rendered components in a process of interwoven mediation that cements us into a commodity value chain.

Dubai is an urbanscape that can be said to have “learned from Las Vegas.” Jameson’s theories can be felt here, in the conflations of image, building and spectacle-event that proliferate. This piecemeal growth of hyperspace - in which a ‘luxury race’ ensures that increasingly grandiose, internationally financed building projects are breaking ground all the time, infinitesimally filling in space, expanding, creating more hyperspace where before there was nothing, just sand or water - is imperfect, unable to attain the immaculate abstraction of, say, petroleum derivatives markets. That is where videos such as this come in: to optically render Dubai as a smooth surface.

The colors everywhere pop. The reflection of from a storefront sign on some granite flooring is as sensuous as the crepuscular rays of the sun peaking over a skyscraper. A fireworks display shoots out of the the monumental Burj Khalifa tower, momentarily inflating its form. Movement is seamless and unbroken, relayed from subject to subject, irrespective of identity, number or leisure activity. It moves smoothly through space, from the inside of an aquarium to a labyrinthine, Orientalist shopping mall to an ice skating rink to a dune swarming with off-road vehicles. An abra, an Emirati water taxi, turns into a motorized speedboat, then a Jeep, then a private plane. Arguably, this frictionless tempo is set from the opening sequence detailing several sites of logistical operation - an airline cockpit, an airport, baggage handling conveyor belts, high-speed rail - which reveals a unified trajectory of luxury and logistics. Proportions conform around this logic of continuous movement, in order to accommodate the ‘flow’. The sky arhythmically trades places with the earth, each receding in turn to a small orb surrounded by the other, figure and ground emerging as a stochastic structure, with the infamous Palm Island, at times, looming larger than the sun.

Time, too, dilates in a nonlinear fashion. In one significant shot, a boat is motoring around in the water before briefly mooring amid busy traffic. The camera pulls back to reveal the skyline, showing two towers being erected, floor by floor, in frenzied, unreal time. The camera then zooms back in and the boat, whose stop was only tentative in the first place, continues on to its destination. This short sequence perfectly elides the immense extraction of labor-power necessary to sustain the construction boom. Like a post-structuralist general theory of relativity might postulate, two observers moving in different strata of the capitalist social relation will have differences in their measurement of time. The time of leisure, as experienced by tourists or the privileged Emirati and ex-pat residents, fully subsumes the time of labor, subordinating it to a mere background image of rapid growth. The construction is a fleeting element, only to be noticed in the short moments of transition between a boat ride and a sky dive. The construction of an entire building in Dubai, while seconds in the video, is a process where it can be expected the dozens of workers will die, either from suicide or accidents resulting from overworking and unsafe conditions. Dubai’s well known human rights abuses and caste system exist in a strategic blur, a temporal pace much too fast for the recreating eye to catch.

The video presents a harmonious disjunction between (certain) bodies and their built environment. Disjunctive because the particulars, the unseen avenues of global capital and migration enabling the hyperspatial fabric of Dubai, are obscured, left out of the cognitive map. Harmonious because human bodies, vehicles and objects move through space with the same ease. There is no disorienting nexus of possible directions overwhelming subjectivities still tuned to modernism’s lack of subtlety. Rather, we have a topological buffet spread, effortlessly traversible, where all points are adjacent to all other points, a modular structure, akin to the compartmental monads of container ships. It is a hyperspace, but a managed, networked hyperspace, one that comes after the advent of intermodal transport hubs. As such, this video is intended to be instructional. The space projected by the video transcends the “capacities of the individual human body to locate itself”, but it offers alternative orienting mechanisms. One no longer has to be an ‘individual’, an ethical-psychological entity, moving within the hyperspaces of postmodernity, one can rather dissolve, become a particle, halfway virtual, leisurely ambulating in an endless, borderless ‘flow motion’ of unframed sensation. This is the proper way to experience Dubai and, by extension, the global archipelago of luxury destinations that accrete as a planetary membrane in a regime of intense capital accumulation.

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You never really see how toxic someone is until you breathe fresher air.

(via turntprincess)

maketotaldeconstruct

Zizek wrote the copy for an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog in 2003. Ummmm…..

maketotaldeconstruct

I am embarrassed; I don’t know how to explain my weakness and my lack of courage, I tell him that all I know how to do is write. He becomes thoughtful, taking in my explanation. He tells me to write with a critical attitude. “Be a hair in the flour,” he explains. He is speaking of the rice flour used to prepare ritual cakes for the appeasement of authority. Communities offer ceremonial cakes to the spirits to keep them from taxing and troubling their human subjects; so, too, such appeasement is understood as the stuff of obedience to the state. A hair in the flour is a disturbance of the everyday subservience and routine. A hair in the flour ruins the legitimacy of power.

Anna Tsing, “Friction” (via maketotaldeconstruct)

You are quite right – I am not moved by any ‘love’ of this sort, and for two reasons: I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective – neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort. I indeed love ‘only’ my friends and the only kind of love I know of and believe in is the love of persons. Secondly, this ‘love of the Jews’ would appear to me, since I am myself Jewish, as something rather suspect. I cannot love myself or anything which I know is part and parcel of my own person. To clarify this, let me tell you of a conversation I had in Israel with a prominent political personality who was defending the – in my opinion disastrous – non-separation of religion and state in Israel. What [she] said – I am not sure of the exact words any more – ran something like this: ‘You will understand that, as a socialist, I, of course, do not believe in God; I believe in the Jewish people.’ I found this a shocking statement and, being too shocked, I did not reply at the time. But I could have answered: the greatness of this people was once that it believed in God, and believed in Him in such a way that its trust and love towards Him was greater than its fear. And now this people believes only in itself? What good can come out of that? Well, in this sense I do not ‘love’ the Jews, nor do I ‘believe’ in them; I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.

Hannah Arendt responding to Gershom Shalom's assertion that she did not love the Jewish people

Violence towards thought

I read Arendt's Eichman in Jerusalem last week and watched the documentary Hannah Arendt today, which was basically about the controversy over that book. Anyways, I have been thinking a lot about how ((Modernity/Neoliberalism/Capitalism/The Machine/Civilization)) empties out or redefines thought, destroying the ability of thinking or personal reflective judgement. We are not left to our own devices but rather these devices become network and subsumed into a singular matrix of control which recalibrates these devices, our faculties of though.

This recalibration has the effect that our thoughts are no longer reflective, no longer ethical, not longer political, no longer concerning how we should live but instead concerned only with a narrow attention on making so called responsible decisions about how to get what one wants or needs according to a strict calculating rationality. With our thoughts no longer governed through a practice of engaged dialogue with the self, the possibility of making personal moral and ethical judgements is gone, precisely the crime that Arendt commits Eichmann of. Responsibility becomes merely feduciary, as if thought was contracted on the part of a body with needs.

Political practice thus becomes a question of how we can unshackle thought from this form of rationality, how we can undomesticate and decolonize the thoughts of ourselves and others and open that wild space of discussion and politics that comes from when individuals regain the capacity to make moral and ethical judgements.

Some anarchist legal theory by yours truly, an anarchist named law

Law ≠ the State

Law ≠ Reason

So, one potential version of an anarchist theory of the law does not reject law as such but instead rejects the singular notion of law which equates law with either the state, the sovereign or the rationally derived "rules of the game" necessary for capital to function. This rejection of Law in the Singular embraces critical debate and discussion, the collective task of endless constructing and deconstructing normative legal orderings. I feel like some anarchists will be super not down as they might be opposed to all possible normative orders, but this strikes me as absurd because it seems normative orders are pretty much inescapable. (Normative orders seem to me to literally are what allow us to communicate across boundaries of difference and transcend our own particularity, without the ability to establish some sort of norm, communication and sociality, the commune, would be impossible) Instead, I think it is useful to differentiate between orders that claim to be situated somehow outside the possibility of interfering or changing them (for example, the law of the state or the abstract principles of "reason") and more provisional normative orders that don't seek to establish themselves through coercion, but instead through processes of seduction. Of course, there are still some thorny issues here: a) attention to seduction will immediately bring up the non-coercive aspects of otherwise coercive normative orders (private property guaranteed by a normative order that functions not only using force but also through the allure of commodities etc.)

b) whether this whole idea is really just a form of crypto-liberalism that valorizes public discussion and debate over politics and ethics. and, if it is, whether this is necessarily bad (i.e. does liberalism necessarily lead to its worst manifestations?)

c) Kindof the opposite issue: what to do with the "anti-social" urges that reject any normative orders in favor of the individual, leading to no ability to imagine a space of politics or ethics where collective discussions about conceptions of social order can occur. Although, I am pretty inlined to leave the knee-jerk "anarchists" who just hate being told what to do without some better conception out of my theorizing.

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