I found the third essay in IMPASSES to be a ramble of mashed up of cited works that largely relies on hyperbolic semantics to make a point. What the point really is I’m unable to decipher other than some vague notion of not being controlled by “society.” Some passages that illustrate what I’m referring to above:
“One of the unifying factors between us all is that we have been socialized into capitalism, by capital. Our minds have been colonized in a way where all all of our social relations are imbued with the nature of capital.” page 51
“The world we inhabit prizes the future in such a way that one’s present self is always going to be subjected to its ability to create the future-child and the future-capital.” page 52
“The Shoah was only able to occur because people were classed as Jewish. We must reject these identities if we are to make the leap towards now-time, the revolutionary process of transformation.” page 64
Some of the more basic problems I’m having with this essay is that it fails to lay out operating definitions of the considerable amount of terminology is uses. And from there the essay goes on to make grandiose claims like the first statement above. There’s no falsifiable evidence offer that all of us have been “socialized” into capitalism. I don’t know what it means to have my mind colonized or what “the nature of capital” actually is.
One central idea of the essay is that of “identity” and that often the “identities” labeled on any of us can be restrictive or oppressive. While this point certainly can be said much more directly than the essay puts it I can agree with the basic premise. We, on the whole, do categorize and label the world to create efficient ways to communicate. We group people by their ethnicity or group like objects into a category so we can reference them without having to spell out in gross detail all that we might reference. This likely springs from the very way in which our nervous system pattern recognizes. It can be very efficient for managing our experience of the world i.e. makes it faster to decide what’s a threat and what isn’t. In it’s efficiency it can also be fatally wrong i.e. all red berries are yummy! can often lead to eating a poisoned berry.
The violence referenced isn’t that of military resistance or physical force. The violence discussed I would more simply just call awareness and learning. I agree that the best sort of resistance against inaccurate and potentially threatening “identities” (aka labels) is through helping people be more aware of the considerable nuance to life, starting with oneself. I completely disagree with one strategy cited in the essay that one way to deal with not wanting to be labeled is simply refusing to have a future (don’t have kids, etc). No, I’m not making a case to have kids, what I’m saying is that there’s no need to resort to a fatalistic solution to eliminate labels and have a more nuanced identity. Reading, paying attention, engaging others generally gets the job done.
By the end of the essay we get to a sentence of the concluding paragraph:
“But anarchist violence renders theory, navel-gazing and reasoned conversation obsolete.”
WAT?! what does this even mean? and no where is actually given any evidence of truth. In the preceding paragraphs of that statement there’s discussion of “a transformative force of experience through action” and all “that remains is the experience of resisting.” To which I guess simply the act of resisting anything is the point? the way towards not having an identity forced upon oneself?
Beyond the nonsense, literally nonsensical, statements one will never escape some amount of label making. The author of the essay starts by labeling the world as Us and Capitalist, etc. I cannot take the point of eliminating labels too seriously by an author that uses too many “ism” words.
Like previous essays there are questions presented at the end of which i can only respond to the question I understand, that is question 2:
One critique of the language you, like Camatte, use, is that it tends to substantialize capital. Marx worked hard to define capital as a social relation, but we end up talking about it as though it were a thing, or some kind of subject. Do you agree that some of your language substantializes capital? Do you think this might be a component of the absoluteness with which you describe it, and thus of the extremity of your response to a world so described?
I think the question asker is correct in that the author of the essay treats capitalism as a thing unto itself. My point above is basically that! for an author that’s trying hard to reject inaccurate labels the use of “capital” conceptually the way the author does violates that idea. We all know the word “capital” has strong connotations. So it would be much preferred for clarity for the author to spell out exactly what behaviors we’re attempting to change instead of simply rejecting “capitalism.”
I myself do not think it’s a sound strategy for a society that wishes to sustain itself to deplete important resources simply in pursuit of financial gain. Sustainable living is a very nuanced activity that indeed does require much deeper awareness and exploratory strategies than I think our society at large is engaged in. We are far too focused on amassing money – the hoarding of future potential – instead of not destroying natural resources, providing each other essential health care, participating in education and so on. That is, we amass money at the expense of doing life giving things that do not require it!
I would LOVE for the author to get into the discussion of actual strategies instead of ranting with extreme language against vague notions of oppression.
