<nettime> Yes please - was: Nein, danke [was Re: Inhabit: Instructions for Autonomy]

[Nina Temporär <nina-temp@gmx.de>]

Oh nice, a smelling [con]test. Want to participate.

It’s very sweet how much effort you put into analysing this „piece of work“,
Probably wanting to be on the right side on this one. It’s very honorable you want to find 
The fly after not seeing the elephant. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself going for this one. ;))

But why didn’t anyone simply do some actual research before making the effort of scouring their mental 
Image libraries equipped with knowledge that potentially isn’t compatible with the younger generations’ 
((mainstream-meets-counter-culture-meshup)) aesthetics anymore?

To be fair, as someone raised in Germany, it’s also my first reaction to go yikes when I see 1930s fonts 
Combined with such warfare imagery and fuzzy pseudo-theory.

On the other hand it’s common knowledge that the re-appropriation of fascist aesthetics is already last 
Decade’s news. „Fascist“ haircuts have been en vogue again for ages, just as well as similar fonts which 
Have been used, for example, by mainstream art institutions like Volksbuehne Berlin and Kunsthalle Vienna, 
Which are not exactly under suspicion for being right wing.

And even though such paramilitary kind of anarchism usually doesn’t appeal to me, I have seen how the 
American antifa dresses up when currently going to protests - shields and all. I mean, no surprise,
Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville was an open call to regard them as fair game.
And this also relates to those who didn’t choose to "be political" in the first place, but who involuntarily
Got thrown into being state enemy number one just by birth, gender, religion, etc. Imagine all you want to
Do is going skating, like any other teenager or twen. And you don’t live in Saudi-Arabia, but a country that
P r o m I s e d  you could. Wouldn’t you set up your protest with the deepest contempt you can possibly 
Express, which would be applying all of your skills to do it the most powerful way know: With the dignity of
Aesthetic radicality, in other words, w I t h  s t y l e ?

This style - that is this generation’s Tyler Durden. (So yes: Fight Club.) It’s this generation’s Willow-going-
full-on--black-eyes. It’s Sarah Connor’s determination meeting the reality of Rojava - and yet not minding 
instagramming it.

So the results of my research are:
While one cannot exactly know what the makers of the „pamphlet“ really think, the people who post
In an appreciative way about the website / booklet on social media

- advocate events with Kimberly Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts and Anita Hill
- bragg about IWW belts as birthday presents
- shout #makeracistsafraidagain 
- promote phone numbers of legal teams before the „fight gainst white supremacy“
- share booklets on Black resistance and on Dis/Ability Topics written by Muslim Women of Trans Experience
- celebrate Murray Bookchin (hilarious pic)
- chant „MAGA - Make AmeriKKKa go away“, 
- call themselves „experimental anti-fascist hip hopers“ and their music „revolutionary new anarchistic hiphop“,
- agree with Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance (yes that one that says no to Nazis)
- and they announce workshops for civil disobedience in relation to #abolishICE.

I didn’t copy the links because I didn’t want to expose the accounts of individuals - the nettime archive is public. 
So in case they are serious and not just hipsters wanting to look dangerous and accidentally end up depoliticizing a
Certain public atmosphere by aesthetization, as it was suspected here, it might not be helpful to them to keep 
Discussing it here.

Best N










> Am 11.11.2018 um 23:47 schrieb tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>:
> 
> I'd be happy to be wrong about that site, and if I am I'll acknowledge it as plainly as I answered Angela's question about fascist recruiting.
> 
> If a cartoon neo-nazi posted a message to this list saying "I'm a fascist and I'm recruiting!" there wouldn't be much need for debate. But someone actually did post a manifesto C&Ped from a site put together by people who find Nazi aesthetics somehow 'resonant' or 'inspiring,' and a bunch of nettimers want to have scholastic debates.
> 
> Ian Alan Paul wrote:
> 
>> Unfortunately I don't have the time to fully respond to every claim of this
>> larger analysis/investigation except to simply say that I think the
>> projection of a white male subject onto a collectively written text (which
>> has happened twice now) is a tired critique of militancy that isn't helpful
>> in the sense that it actively erases the explicitly feminist movements
>> which have adopted and practiced similar kinds of political thought. Of
>> course it's fine to be critical of militant politics, and indeed we must be
>> having these kinds of debates more often, but to do so on the grounds that
>> there is something irrevocably masculine about militancy is to simply echo
>> right wing talking points about gender.
> 
> Ian, if you want to argue that I projected white male subjectivity onto a picture of two white guys crouching in the dirt with binoculars and a rifle, go for it. If anything, that criticism is a better description of your own assumption that a white male sniper is somehow benign. Why don't you show that picture to people in an African-American church in Charleston or a yoga studio in Tallahassee and see what they think? Or you could just ask me. When I'm in Tallahassee, which is fairly often, I pass that yoga studio ferrying my daughter to and from school. Was I affected by the shooting? No, not directly. But her school conducts active-shooter drills, and just weeks ago went into real lockdown. So, yes, it affects her — and that affects me. Your theoretical posturing has nothing to say to or about any of this.
> 
> Whatever the authors' intent may be, their decision to include that photo is a sign of their profound blindness to one of the most visible and terrifying developments in the US: the asymptotic growth of mass murder by white guys with guns. But it's not just that one photo. The site doesn't show white men as many see them — as tyrannical bosses, abusive partners, racist cops, exploitive gringos, or monstrous colonists. There's are reasons for that, of course, and one of them is good: the site presents what its authors see as a positive vision. It 'includes' others, but mainly as tokens, props, foils, objects, veils, and references. What it doesn't include — in other words, what it *excludes* — is any frank depiction of the horrors of white violence.
> 
> But more than that, as even Brian acknowledges,
> 
>> The really weird thing here is the typeface, for sure. I think that in the
>> age of atrophied thought and controlled imaginations there is an
>> unconscious sexualized attraction to the passions of war, symbolized by the
>> aesthetics of the 1930s. In this sense I agree with the gist of Ted's
>> analysis: the intention is that of normalizing a largely fantasmatic
>> violence, without realizing how enabling the practice of that fantasy can
>> be for the hard right.
> 
> Let's add 2 + 2, shall we? We have a site largely organized around white subjectivity and visuality that plays footsie with fascist aesthetics. But that's supposed to be OK because the authors' attraction to "the passions of war" — what a turn of phrase — is unconscious, sexualized, or somehow symbolic. Anyone who buys that might want to brush up on their Klaus Theweleit.
> 
> But, again, it's not just the typography and graphic design. Of the sites 20 or so photos, *half* imply some kind of violence: guns, training camps, burning cars and debris, etc. The object of that violence isn't specified: we don't know who the punching bag stands for, what mission the two motorcyclists are on, what conflicts are obscured by the smoke and fire. (Well, actually, we do because I went to the trouble of tracking down the photos. But less committed people looking at the site — i.e., everyone else of the face of the earth — wouldn't know that.) If the victims of this imagined violence were black, latin, or muslim, this site would be a warm-fuzzy version of the Turner Diaries, which surely isn't what the authors believe or intend. So let's assume that the victims would all magically be white. What we have then is basically a white vision of a white world erupting in white violence, from which 'others' are excluded because the authors can't be frank about who'd be doing all that fighting — and *we* don't need to be frank about it because it's all just unconscious and symbolic.
> 
> Jamie King wrote:
> 
>> I will say this though -- a bunch of the dodgy fashers I follow on Twitter
>> (maybe 6-7 accounts) follow them. But calling for violence and and all that
>> doesn't make anyone fash. Nor does fooling with fascist aesthetics. What
>> about Tiqqun and all of that?
> 
> This is the Bryan Ferry defense: "My comments on Nazi iconography were solely made from an art history perspective."
> 
> Brian also wrote:
> 
>> Its production values are within reach of anyone who can afford a
>> laptop, an Amazon bucket and a domain name. Its imagery is of a piece with
>> the rest; and by looking around on the web you can see that it was
>> originally published as an orange-tinted book, so maybe the pseudo-print
>> aesthetic has a simple explanation.
>> 
>> The idea that it's a psychologist's honey-pot crafted to catch the naive is
>> far-fetched. This is anarchy. The positions codified by Tiqqun and
>> popularized by the Invisible Committee have become widespread through the
>> experiences of Exarchia, the ZAD, Standing Rock and many others, with the
>> Palestinian resistance and the Kurdish war of independence blazing in the
>> background. The elemental question to be asked is, do I make common cause
>> with these authors? A corollary line of questioning would be: Is civil war
>> inevitable in the capitalist democracies? Could it have positive effects?
> 
> Brian, you're right that generic high production values are within reach of many now. But the question isn't 'does it look professional?', it's what *kind* of 'professional' does it look like? What specific cultural references does it make, and what do they say about the authors?
> 
> If you encountered someone spouting lines from Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee dressed in a razor-sharp black suit and sporting a red-and-white armband, you'd raise an eyebrow. And if that person said "no, silly, my suit and armband are just a style that's OK because, hey, *this is anarchy*," you'd raise the other one.
> 
>> <...> The serious threat of civil war comes from the extreme right, they
>> have both the numbers and the guns. Throw gasoline on that fire and it will
>> explode in your face.
> 
> Here are some other things the extreme right has: serious network savvy, a penchant for infiltrating and subverting, coordinated efforts to muddy the distinction between left and right, and ties to established rightists who've spent decades misleading popular discontent to further their agenda. These things pose a much greater threat than gasoline metaphors.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ted
> 
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