Art and anarchy: Formulas of a political ethics
Art and anarchy: Formulas of a political ethics
Social alienation + talent in a field of expression = the artist (includes the critic and theorist)
Social alienation + love of thinking about it and refusal to obey = punks
Social alienation + organized refusal and struggle = the left
But:
Denial of experienced social alienation = resentment, resignation, cynicism, (Cynicism, the ethos of the bully, is not merely selfish but also highly moral; bullies are enforcers).
Talent + dis-alienation = self-satisfied professionals and enforcers. (Often WASPs, BASPs, and JASPs, whose morality scarcely extended beyond recommendations for genteel manners.)
Alienation + a theory of good vs. evil = pseudo-radical political social justice warriors
Memory of alienation + psychological/ethical theories of dis-alienation = Social worker types (who want to save the world from its evils)
Trained for a job + a social alienation they never thought much about = security guards, cops, all the non-professionally educated enforcers. (Slogan: Free the security forces themselves will be ended if we end the security state)
Self-dissatisfaction understood in moral terms = therapy patient or spiritual seeker. (See also 'denial" above). (Risks become smug self-satisfaction).
Risk factor for all the above: Danger of becoming liberals
Self-dissatisfaction understood in political terms: Art, the left, punk
The artist has no country and no people. His country is art. Like the intellectuals, whose country is books.
The artist is a stranger everywhere and loves it.
The artist is not a psychological category.
The artist is a way of being political. Art is a political category.
Government is not politics, but the police.
Government needs a state of subjects who are unfortunate losers. They will be "helped." Whether we like it or not. We probably won't.
Psychology depoliticizes; the task is to politicize the culture and society
The resentful are subjects of governance.
Artists are citizens or makers of the political.
Professionals do not serve the people but capital and the state.
This state takes care of people. (Therapy for some, prisons or elimination for others).
We are not outside society. Society is an anti-political myth. (It is the myth of the state that supplies its absent referent. That referent exists only as enforced.).
Thinking questions the given. It legitimates nothing, justifies nothing It does not explain how things are so that people being led by leaders will understand and follow. Everyone can be a thinker. That shit is happening is always useful in thinking.
Thinking does not tell you what is or how it is, except for the sake of changing it. Thus, thinking does not desire that its theories be put into practice.
Thinking is not mastery or control. It is not a project or task that is merely to be done well.
Thinking, like art, is joyful. Our society is therapeutic and such a society eliminates joy, This is because it has profound fear of joyful activities. Feared are the potentialities of those who are supposed to just do their job and buy and obey. The therapeutic state is a social control apparatus that knows no affirmative and joyful potentialities of the subjects whom it rules. Our only potentiality for them is crime: to commit or be victim of it (it doesn't matter). Crime and disease and social failure. The real fear of all masters and management is social failure, breakdown. The best recourse they usually manage is to say that individuals have had break-downs and become broken down, abnormal, perhaps with manifest disaffection and suffering.
The therapy state says: It is wrong to be uncomfortable, we will protect you against that. If you see any discomfort that’s unusual, say something. If you get wind of a feeling, call the authorities; it may signify a real and present danger. (Resistance may be uncomfortable; is that how you know it must be wrong? Do your feelings tell you what is or only what are the social norms likely to be enforced with violence?)
As if we were for them only tools. Which is what we are; for capital, people are labor power and the power to be exploited to generate profit through purchasing and associating and every kind of activity. The therapeutic world is a part of the world of capital and state, project and technique. Business is an apparatus for getting things done. The managers always have only one thing to say: This is how it is, now get back to work, you lazy bums, and don't forget you must collect your own straw. The discourse of management and being managed, which partly is a task we must all do to ourselves, is sad. Its music is repetitive, and meant to depress and annoy in controlled ways that keep people in a holding pattern. The message is that life is laborious and sad, but soon enough it will be over, and you can go home. Life has tasks, they must be managed, and these tasks are boring and the management is sad.
What it excludes is the joyful work of art and thinking.
The liberal's utopia is the total state that is concerned with the welfare of all of its subjects, not citizens, who are entitled to help through correctional procedures because they are said to be lacking losers.
The utopia of artists is also that of the left. It is anarchy. Anarchy is not disorder but order only in freedom. Anarchists recognize liberals as among our enemies. But while liberals plan, whether known to them or not, some of us are - dangerously - thinking. It is risky to think about or do anything, because to do something is not or not only to put an idea into practice; it is more to experiment, and there is no guarantee of results. (Though historically, the left has normally been defeated; but it may win some gains that remain).