Made and Being Made: For a Manifesto of Positive Anarchy

By Monday Morning#443 (16/09/2024), we share a text by Maria Kakogianni – a manifesto of anarchy -, which coincidentally comes in the wake of our last post, Miguel Amorós’ article, “What is anarchism?”. The contrast between the two pieces can serve – as we believe – to raise further, fundamental questions.

Made and Being Made: For a Manifesto of Positive Anarchy

1. There is not just one bow(1) but several. Our world is polyarchic.

2. There are positive forms of anarchy.

3. Anarchy is not an object of the will, but an object of experience.

4. What happens, happens.

5. Capital is a monster without head or tail, hence the practical difficulty of ‘chopping off its head’.

6. The capitalist state is a two-headed apparatus. A repressive apparatus and a management apparatus. A password and a password. It can be fascist and liberal at the same time, without any difficulty.

7. The exploitation and accumulation of wealth and the accumulation of sexual gratification through rape and depletion of human and non-human resources are part of the same system of domination.

8. People who don’t know spelling and grammar think. They are capable. They sow seeds. A popular song says so. And walls do that too.

9. A project of autonomy is a way to choose dependencies. You can depend on the agri-food industry for food, or you can create and cultivate other dependencies. To be denied.

10. The rich, heteronormative, biodegrading white male exercises all forms of domination simultaneously. Intersectionality is not a mental police force to classify subalterns from a small part to a lesser part. It names the operations by which subalterns organize themselves to do the greatest damage to the order of places, objects, and subjects.

11. Anarchy is not static, it is dramaturgical. It is neither a modality of order nor a modality of disorder, but a dynamic milieu of forces and forms, of powers to affect and powers to be affected, of powers to do and powers not to do, which maintains over time a “conflict of worlds,” that is, an effective cleavage within the very fabric of what a world can be.

12. The geometry of progress invented an idea of ​​Revolution as a great radical break, with a before and an after. This idea collapsed at the same time as the belief in human progress. We are now living in catastrophe and the pornography of catastrophe.

13. We like to think that other civilizations, all that do not bear the name of the West, inhabit a cyclical world, that of the seasons. In this they know only the revolution without history as a return to the starting point.

14. We need a concept of revolution in history and with seasons. Neither cyclical nor progressive. One that focuses as much on the event as on the temperature and the crescent moon. Alien and maximally earthly at the same time.

15. Deleuze said somewhere, not without humor, that etymology is the proper philosophical athletics. The concept of anarchy has long suffered from the consequences of this athletics. We have always had a privative -A and therefore a negative form, anarchy. Who commands? Positive anarchy as an experience positively names a gap. It is also a crossing, a test and undoubtedly an endangerment.

16. There is no power that can be taken as a center. There are fixed configurations and preferential circuits between the centers of power that can be attacked, twisted, and deformed.

17. People who have back pain because they are fed up know this. There are fixed configurations and preferential pain circuits. We are not addressing the problem at the root.

18. In the circular orbit there is a single center; eccentricity is zero. I revolve, therefore I am. The same mistakes, the same pleasures, the same litanies. In contrast to this, the planets – “those who wander” – revolve in an ellipse, a movement that implies not one center but two foci. It is the gap, the mobile, plastic, dynamic relationship between the foci that gives the eccentricities their substance. These are not miniature exceptionssmall microcosmic radicalities defending themselves with their magic potion. They are positive distortions, happy deformations, real reforms of the track.

19. Eternity in the stars, Victory is the name of what has duration. We need new beginnings, new beginnings that are simply a way of taking over: positive anarchy with two foci.

20. Anarchizing the world instead of understanding it.

Maria Kakogianni

(1) Principle, beginning, command