“Let there be no mistake: multiculturalism is a strategy designed to save ‘America’ as an idea, and as a system of social control… The trouble is that the theory itself emanates neither from the Right nor Left nor Center. It emanates from the top. It’s a theory of control.”
“Amour fou is not a Social Democracy, it is not a Parliament of Two. The minutes of its secret meetings deal with meanings too enormous but too precise for prose.”
“Who can blame us for harboring both a nostalgia & and insurrectionary desire for the narrow winding alleys, shadowy steps, covered ways & tunnels, middens & cellars of a city which has designed itself — organically, unconsciously — within an æsthetic of festive & secret conviviality, & of the curvacious negentropic mutability of memory itself?”
“A.S. goes beyond paranoia, beyond deconstruction — the ultimate criticism — physical attack on offensive art — aesthetic jihad… A.S. seeks to damage institutions which use art to diminish consciousness & profit by delusion… MUZAK is designed to hypnotize & control — its machinery can be smashed.”
“The attar of Hassan-i Sabbah’s propaganda seeps into the criminal dreams of ontological anarchism, the heraldry of our obsessions displays the luminous black outlaw banners of the Assassins.”
“New professional jargon always provides the semanticist/sociologist a golden opportunity to unpack hidden political and psychological content from tell-tale words and phrases — and ‘boundary violation’ is a veritable trick suitcase — a richness of embarrassments.”
“Not only have the chains of Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.”
“In our world Chaos has been overthrown by younger gods, moralists, phallocrats, banker-priests, fit lords for serfs. If rebellion proves impossible then at least a kind of clandestine spiritual jihad might be launched.”
“The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat — & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you — so don’t play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr — accept the fact that you’re a criminal & be prepared to act like one.”
“Since Nietzsche’s time law has perhaps mutated from a complex but many-dimensional tool of the oppressor class to the subtle, fatal, all-pervasive self-image of the spectacle.”
“The internet is interesting to me because it seems to have a liberatory potential — we want to find out its psychedelic aspect. I personally am getting more and more pessimistic; the trajectories all seem to end in a reduction of our autonomy.”
“The Evil Eye — mal occhio — truly exists, & modern western culture has so deeply repressed all knowledge of it that its effects overwhelm us & are mistaken for something else entirely.”
“Once the image of Heaven on Earth, the state now consists of no more than the management of images. It is no longer a ‘force’ but a disembodied pattering of information.”
“The autonomy of the individual appears to be complemented & enhanced by the movement of the group; while the effectiveness of the group seems to depend on the freedom of the individual.”
“The last thing we need in this struggle are more naïve theories about seizing the media or boring from within or liberating the airwaves. Give me one example of a radical take-over of major media, and I’ll shut up and apply for a job at PBS, or start looking around for a few million dollars.”
“The Internet is so new, the computer itself is so new that it has this kind of magic aura, a halo around it. Out of that feeling, there came certain expectations that were almost messianic: the feeling that the Internet was going to save us, that the Internet was out of control.”
“There’s something magical about the mail — voices from the Unseen — documents as amulets — and something very american, democratic & self-reliant — mysterious urban folklore — old ads for AMORC in crumbling yellow magazines…”
“I may very well be romanticizing the NGZ as a possible utopian topos or site — but then again, I might be inclined to defend the occasional usefulness of romanticism: — it beats despair. The NGZ is on the way, whether we dread it or romanticize it.”
“The fact is that any map will fit any territory… given sufficient violence… These complexes are nothing but unreal estate, properties to be stripped of assets, vampirized for imagery, propped up to keep the marks in line, manipulated for profit — but not taken seriously by grown-ups.”
“Religion forbids sexuality, thus investing denial with glamour; capital withdraws sexuality, infusing it with despair… Romance will become the perfect two-dimensional obsession of the popular song and the advertisement, serving the utopian trace within the infinite reproduction of the commodity.”
“If conspiracy theory is essentially right-wing, it can only be so because it posits a view of History as the work of individuals rather than groups… Anarchism posits that elites are simply carried by the flow of History and that their belief in their own power and agency is pure illusion…. Maybe conspiracies don’t work. But we have to act as if they do work.”
“Anyone who’s ever witnessed a phalanx of Americans or a busload of Japanese advancing on some ruin or ritual must have noticed that even their collective gaze is mediated by the medium of the camera’s multi-faceted eye, and that the multiplicity of cameras, videocams, and recorders forms a complex of shiny clicking scales in an armor of pure mediation.”
“This essay will be printed in the catalog of a gallery exhibition, thus perpetuating the irony of calling for the suppression and realization of art from within the very structure that perpetuates the alienation of the non-artist and the fetishization of the artwork. Well, fuck irony.”
From the 16th to the 19th century, Moslem corsairs from the Barbary Coast ravaged European shipping and enslaved many thousands of unlucky captives. During this period, however, thousands of Europeans also converted to Islam and joined the pirate ‘holy war.’ Were these men (and women) the scum of the seas, apostates, traitors — ‘Renegadoes’? Or did they abandon and betray Christendom as a praxis of social resistance?
“Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they’re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune…”
“If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism… Pornography has a measurable physical effect on its readers. Like propaganda it sometimes changes lives because it uncovers true desires.”
“Invented by the Chinese but never developed for war — a fine example of Poetic Terrorism — a weapon used to trigger æsthetic shock rather than kill… gunpowder more useful to frighten malign demons, delight children, fill the air with brave & risky-smelling haze.”
“All this may seem overly-complex to anyone unfamiliar with the Moorish Orthodox Church’s long-established policy of deliberate syncretism, positive ‘heresy,’ anti-hierarchalism and anti-authoritarianism… We take our stand at the nexus where religion becomes æsthetic, festal, ludic, and creative — a source and power for freedom, for both the individual and the group.”
“The Universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity — those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity — those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men’s eyes.”
“A Tong can perhaps be defined as a mutual benefit society for people with a common interest which is illegal or dangerously marginal — hence, the necessary secrecy.”
“To embrace disorder both as wellspring of style & voluptuous storehouse, a fundamental of our alien & occult civilization, our conspiratorial esthetic, our lunatic espionage — this is the action (let’s face it) either of an artist of some sort, or of a ten- or thirteen-year-old.”
“Here I wish to suggest that the TAZ is in some sense a tactic of disappearance.”
On This Day in Snigglery
April 25, 1983: Two million copies of Stern magazine, containing the first excerpts from the diaries of Adolf Hitler, hit news stands. (See The Hitler Diaries for more info)
