Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #39, Winter '94.
ESSAYS

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                __A__Game__For__The__Nineties:__
                             ASE(tm)
                         By Neal Keating

 It is 1993 and the general observation that the practice of people
submitting to work on a daily normalized basis is the primary motor
reproducing the daily phenomena of society continues to be all too
accurate.

 Part of these phenomena are the ideologies and thinking about the
process of social reproduction -- the reflecting on the doing.
Controlling these reflections through the division and specializa-
tion of knowledge has had a regulating effect determining what is
and what is not suitable for framing as germane questions. An
example of the latter is the question of what comes after the
commerce-state-class form of power; or, what comes after the rule
of law? While these two questions may be on the tongues of many an
anti-authoritarian, from the point of view of ``maintaining
order,'' these questions are best rendered irrelevant. This
determination of relevance=FEin its turn=FEmaintains the ongoing
submission to the miserable confines of rank and work, not unlike
the way the blinders keep a poor horse in a dumb race.

ROUND AND ROUND

 The Marxist discourse generally dismissed ideology as a peripher-
al, a ``super-structural'' aspect of social phenomena. Subsequent
critiques of Marx, notably those of the Frankfurt school and the
situationists, recognized a more essential function of ideology.
Ideas and actions are never separate. Dreaming and thinking are
also actions. Arranging dreams and thoughts into systems of ideas
or visions is another form of action. They are actions that are
different from the ``physical'' action of the deed. An interre-
lation nevertheless obtains between them. It is a murky yet potent
juxtaposition of a binary pair of opposites. It was when Adorno
tried to elucidate it, and it is even more so today.

 Social life in the ``first world'' today is largely based on the
ironic fear of the violence that its very own class structures
produce. The fantasy of races continues as a central explanation of
violence. The rhetoric of racial types continues as a central
explanation of violence. The concept of racial types is a categori-
cal arrangement of difference that is especially suited, if not
custom-made, for the divisions necessary to class structures. The
idea here is that all structures have some kind of division. Not
all societies have structures mind you. Ours still does. Think of
a house. What holds up the second floor? It is usually some sort of
support wall, i.e. a division. In a class structure there are
several divisions. In terms of power, there is the primary division
of those that have and them that do not. The racial type is
especially useful here for identification purposes.

 History, such as we know it, is the special device for maintaining
the current divisions, and thus helps to produce the determination
of relevance. It is especially useful as examples to be cited in
the present for the purposes of upholding this or that body of law.
The familiar theme is as follows: ``You want to know what happens
when the law breaks down? Well, look at history.'' It is often
violent. But that is not all it is. History is also always partial,
always incomplete. It tends to leave out the best parts of the
human story=FEthose parts where people got away.

 History is directly linked to law. When law breaks down, or when
law never existed, is when the writing of history=FEthe documentation
of activity=FEis absent or simply never was. That does not mean there
is no activity. It does not mean that it leaves no traces behind=FEit
does. But for us flatlanders trained in obedience and conformity to
the rule of law, those traces are more problematic than explanato-
ry. Just like the brightness of a full moon blots out the stars
around it, so too does the spectacular glow of our categories of
thought - our epistemic machines - block the full view of the other
epistemological figures: the heteroclites. There are blinders on
our imaginations. It is said that if we remove them, the greater
blindness may wreck our eyes with wonder. Is that really so bad?

ABORIGINAL LESSONS

 For example, there have been found at many archaeological sites
in the Northeastern Woodlands of North America such traces as to
indicate the presence of an extensive and quick network of exchange
among indigenous people here, just prior to the contact period (ca.
1600 a.d.), and going back at least two centuries. The nature of
this network continues to elude these scholars laboring under
today's social scientific frameworks of inquiry. In these wood-
lands, with these people, there was no commodification, there were
no profits, and no property. These are the forces that animate
modern networks of commerce. There are entire libraries boasting of
the collective understanding of these three forces. But when
confronted with the question of what the motor driving woodlands
exchange was, the specialists generally shrug their shoulders and
quickly move along. Or if they try, they can only cast their answer
in terms that make sense in their a priori epistemic assumptions,
e.g. they were pre-capitalist: they were on their way to establish-
ing statist institutions but got interrupted by their collision
with Europe. Such assumptions are still widely held, and for good
reason - they emphasize the class structures currently in place. The
other idea - that woodlands exchange was driven by a different kind
of motor that cannot be explained within first world epistemic
frameworks - emphasizes reciprocity, and as such, must naturally be
omitted from relevance.

HOW TO PLAY

 I now propose a new form of praxis, and one that is already
beginning to be engaged spontaneously and diversely. Adopting
Bakunin's basic ``revolutionary negation,'' that the urge to
destroy is always already a creative urge; along with Proudhon's
dicta ``property is theft'' and incorporating Durkheim's idea of
the conscience collective (i.e., that complex of socio-cultural be-
havioral codes that precede and inform the human that is born into
it), I will outline a game of historical/ideological disrupture for
anti-authoritarians, to be played in those interludes between
deeds.

 The object of this game, then, is to apply an emancipatory episte-
mology (free-frame thinking, or as Feyerabend puts it ``anything
goes'') to the conscience collective through its venues of daily
life. In particular the venue of historical reference that both
legal and political systems depend on is a particularly febrile
location favoring successful play. But so is a St. Patrick's Day
parade (bring back the snakes), or a night of playful mischief in
the streets. Alas, so too is the workplace.

 Epistemology is the question about how knowledge is formed or
produced. How do we know things? How do we explain that the
knowledge of things changes? Virtually every statement involves a
number of given assumptions. How do particular assumptions come to
be accepted as given? Answering these questions involves digging
into issues and forces rather primary but not readily apparent.
Digging into them with Bakunin's revolutionary negation can be
highly combustible, and just as satisfying.

 Let's call this game Applied Systematic Entropy (ASE). Assume your
lived experience is a temporary locus through which many diverse
historical forces pass and collide, more or less randomly or at the
behest of some strange gods, violently or non-violently. The
movement of these forces constitutes the historical process. It is
the active component of the conscience collective. Let's call this
process a river. And into this river are innumerable other loci of
experience from time immemorial that alter the flow of the river in
subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Your move is to place an altered
locus into the river and observe the effects it makes (Does it make
enticing ripples? Does it make a huge jam, the kind that breaks
bridges?). In choosing what locus to place where, you are guided by
one rule=FEanything goes. That is it. Taking notes is a good idea. A
robust anti-history will confound and evoke. It might not explain
anything at all. Remember that the removal of the blinders, Blake's
``bursting the mind-forg'd manacles,'' is the goal. Sometimes
explanations are not necessary to achieve this.

 Then the next player goes. The game continues until, as a result
of the action between the placement of loci and the reaction of the
river, either a general insurrection breaks out, or the ramparts of
the sacred go flying into heaps of rubble, or a significant
ideologic disrupture occurs. At that time, play is suspended and
the game is over. A new game starts after the festivities have
subsided, and the players are so inclined, comfortably situated
amongst the ruins of the former epoch.

 This unusual game has the architectural advantage of a framework
for action that does away with the need for the kinds of unfortu-
nate Christian appeals to morality and goodness that so many past
dreamers have depended on for their zeal and mania. It accommodates
devils as well as angels. All you need for this game is some basic
acquaintance with your own desires and a taste for heresy.

 As a result of this emancipated framework, one is freed up from
the highly constrained activism typical of U.S. dissent. For
example, demonstrations and marches have generally taken place
under the assumption that direct confrontation will pressure the
government into acting in a more ethical or moral way. When playing
ASE, one can operate under different assumptions, such as that co-
vert sabotage might trigger a series of forces that break up the
government, as well as giving you an immediate kick. Or that covert
sabotage might start an ongoing public autonomous discourse. Be-
cause in ASE the epistemological assumptions are just game pieces,
as opposed to unquestioned moral foundations, they are much less
precious and much more flexible. There is more room for spontaneous
effects and mutant development. This is also what makes it danger-
ous. ASE rides right through that strait where the Charybdis of
fascism waits on one side, while the Scylla of insipid passivity
lurks on the other. Anything can happen when anything goes. The
whole thing hinges on the player's egoism, not the constraint of
the rule of laws.

 In the modern and post-modern world we can make the observation
that many gloomy ideological clouds of capital and Christianity
regularly cover its entire surface, albeit patchy in lots of
places. Removing this cloud through a total critique has proven
impractical. Leviathan lingers on. One alternative strategy that
presents itself today is that of locally rending a part of this
cloud into strange and wondrous contours that have an effect of
systemic disrupture. I have proposed Applied Systemic Entropy (ASE)
as a river-game that may serve this other strategy. I contend that
this game is already being played under different names and in
diverse circumstances.

 The gamble of ASE is this: if you lose, you will make the cloud
cover so heavy you can not move; or you may yourself be reified by
the gloom. You might start a war.
=20
 But if you win, you get away -- to play another day.


 This essay originally appeared in a supplement to the Loompanics
Unlimited catalog (POB 1197, Port Townsend, WA. 98368), and an
earlier version appeared in The Moorish Science Monitor (POB 85777,
Seattle, WA. 98145-1777). The author can be contacted at: POB
250219, New York, NY. 10025-1533.