Against "Resistance"

Go Out There And Subsume That Shit

I recently stopped participating in this film screening project that I was working on called Resistance Cinema.

When we started the project, the idea was just to do “radical” movie screenings and then have discussions. That is what I was super down for.

The other people involved would describe themselves as Marxists and thinkers oriented toward decolonization. These schools of thought are of course very large and diverse, with many different practitioners who should not all be lumped into one category, especially when making what would be interpreted as critical remarks.

Anyway, I went along with their vision and their mission statement, which was a choice among the choices that have been made. Our mission statement mentioned being anti-capitalism, de-centering Western voices, and things like that. These are more examples of rhetoric that I just don’t vibe with whatsoever.

So we had a conversation and I just let them keep doing it, because it had pretty much been done their way the whole time. Better to begin again with the intention not to put energy into something I’m not fully invested in.

This is where I want to discuss the reasons for my disinvestment from the idea of resistance. I am of course aware that anyone familiar with my illustrious visage will be aware that I would be categorized as a “white guy,” and of fairly affluent situation. As such, I am very aware that I will be evaluate as to whether I am a fascist or something like this.

So when I tell you that the way to get to a place where everyone is flourishing is not to “defeat the system,” whatever you think the system is, I hope that you will see that my aim is by no means to extend or encourage or facilitate the extension of any harm to anyone induced by kinetic means (striking, shooting, bombing, etc.), non-kinetic means (emotional abuse, deception), or privation (lack of access to essential goods like food, medicine, good information).

All that said, my approach to politics as you might call it would be similar to Aikido, which I am aware I am not really equipped to give you a good idea of. What I’m referencing though is the notion of moving with whatever is presenting a threat to you. Instead of resisting in the sense of trying to block and impede the motion of some other person, you are moving with their motion in order to redirect it so that no harm befalls you.

I have discussed similar themes with regard to the notion of exploit as theorized by Veblen. The idea is to take energies directed in one way and use them for something else.

In this way, it is very much an idea of subsuming those who would subsume you. It is very much an appropriation of all the culture of conquest and such triumphalism, which should be reoriented, all subsumed like the Nazi iconography used by Rammstein. These things can be wielded, not against their originators, but as they were always meant to be intended, by those with the excellence of vision and fire of boldness ready to make the gestures of the moment.

This is why I have said before, modifying a lyrics from “Dead Souls” by Joy Division: “Conquistadors, we take our share.” Again, I am very aware that I am considered by you likely a white man. It gets worse: I’m half German, and yes, my German grandfather fought in the Nazi army. He was in the Waffen-SS, and he was very coercively induced to join in 1944 when he was 17, making him technically a child soldier. So much bargaining and qualification, but the implications are clear.

The point of my interpretation of the Joy Division lyric is not that I am a conquistador and others are not. What I mean by my lyric has something to do with a confrontation with what has been called theodicy, or the problem of evil. This can be couched in a certain framework like Christianity and a sub-interpretation thereof, etc., but people have been mean to each other and dying and stuff like that forever, so there has always been this very ambivalent nature of the relationship to the world.

It is a sunny day, with someone else. And you’re getting along, and laughing, and being close. It’s another day, and the ashes are rising from the smokestacks, and the frozen bodies are impossibly gaunt, hollowed out long before they lost their breath.

This all hangs together, how we come in with blood and screaming and crying and people say it is the most beautiful thing. And, in a way, it is. All the young ones marching off to war, looking so dapper in their uniforms, still unbesmirched by the mud and blood of their brothers in arms. And they will lie there and wonder what they are dying for, and soon enough the reason doesn’t matter, and all that’s left is the feeling…

It’s in this sense that if I describe life to you as a feast, all laid out and it’s just up to you which part you want to eat first. But if you fill up on one part there won’t be room for something else, mind you. When we are thinking this way, we have to realize that all the zest and beauty is delivered on a train of death and suffering and the worst things that you can imagine.

And also that this has always been so, even before colonialism and before the industrial revolution.

So, think back to a tribal existence. You would be mounting a resistance to some other tribe, but not on the basis of a moral denunciation. Rather that you must struggle in order to defend and expand your way of life. It is better that we be clear that in this, we are just the same as all other participants. There is some subtlety to seeing that there is no necessary unchanging nature of a way of life as well.

The upshot is that it is not on the basis of resisting something condemnable that action should be taken.

When we do this, we move too quickly. We do not respect the fact that it is in fact mysterious why these things are happening. We are liable to take things at face value which may have layers of intention behind them.

And we also deny ourselves the sovereignty of purpose to say that we are here to serve our own purposes and to flourish. We mean to make a home for ourselves and to be dignified among those we love and cherish. Everyone can equally say this and have the same moral standing.

It is only natural that as conflict continues to wage, there will be more and more novel sorts of killings and atrocities that will occur. This will happen as long as we choose the hard way, which is to refuse to consider our own notions and instead seek to get everyone else to bend the knee to our dogma, whether that be Marxist, decolonial, religious, economic, etc.

So, what am I for, then? I do like the idea of beloved community. Love is a nice word. It must be very richly understood, because you don’t really love someone until you love the worst thing about them. And you won’t even likely know that since it’s too frightening for most of us to share that with most people.

The other way is to have an open-ended love. I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, what you did, as long as you love me. This is actually a very stark statement, embracing the other in their mysteriousness, even knowing that this could basically be like a blank check there’s not enough money in the world to cash. In other words, to be okay not knowing everything, or even very much, about someone, because of how much your time together means to you.

When I say beloved community, I am thinking of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was born in this city I moved to at 2 months old. But I mainly draw my own associations. It’s not only the depth of our own history of violence and all that which must be traversed in order to actually love.

It’s also the social world. Love is like life, it has to have an ecosystem. And all the ecosystems are connected, and they’re all being taken over by very powerful machines. The same way elk get crowded out of a glade, we’re going to be sucked into grey goo nanobots that just want our atoms. And that could happen to anyone, regardless of how rich you are.

At the same time, dogmas have everything to do with why it seems that this will happen. People are fighting, and it seems like the most impossible thing ever for them to come together and be transparent, do what is necessary to show a good quality of intention. And, before that, to develop such a good quality of intention.

“Resistance” dogmas are themselves by now traditions. They are institutionalized and they do wield social authority against idiosyncratic non-cormformists. These discourses are themselves hegemonic and imperialist in that they demand everyone speak in their terms, which is to take on a set of political commitments. Yet worldly affairs are always uncertain, and so this cannot be appropriate.

I’m challenging myself by thinking, well, killing is wrong and you shouldn’t find some back bending logic to make it okay. Yes, fair enough. But even the terms we’re using here can still be interrogated, and I would be open to that, even as some commitment to something like non-violence or ahimsa in spirit seems right to me.

In addition to some wannabe authoritarian white male, I could of course also be seen as a potential terrorist. What I’m trying to say is that such activities don’t appeal to me because I don’t honestly think that the solution to anything is anyone dying. It can be an act of feeling inadequate to do something like that because you don’t know what else to do. You feel outmatched by the gauntlet life threw down at you, and you just want to do something dramatic and impactful.

That generally resonates with me, but I think that lashing out is not what’s going to help. That said, I am by no means advocating placating others or humoring their conceptualizations.

On the contrary, I advocate instead the termination of all fixed ideas with extreme prejudice. As Zizek might say, the real violence is done to the symbolic order, and as Zweibelson said, we need to be knee-deep in sacred cow blood.

This is not merely a matter for egg-heads and weird videos on YouTube. This must be brought to everyone and made unmistakable. But it’s not a civil war, it’s just The Weirdening. It’s the cultural singularity. There are many comparisons I could make to sauciness, but I’ll leave that to your imagination.

The issue is that everyone has someone they think is their enemy. So, if you want to include everyone, then no one will want to join, because everyone has someone in mind that they refuse to accept as part of the group.

To that I will ask you where you think the world came from. Whatever the source is, providence has led to both you and the thing you detest. This grappling is part of the experience of your life. All these grapplings that we all have, with individuals, with memories, with concepts and groups, and all this; this is the substance of what we must get through. Overcoming learned helplessness and ways we thought we had to be but we actually don’t.

We go through these experiences over, and over. This is a new kind of OODA loop, and it’s one that many people are progressing through ever more rapidly.

So, instead of being in resistance, I am thinking of the Inuit concept of Sila, or the Lakota concept of Wakan Tanka. These are things that flow through everything, things that ground everything. In this sense, there is nothing that happens that should not have happened. It is all part of the puzzle.

This is not to say that we must accept being humiliated or being in a position of symbolic inferiority that we can feel at every moment. By no means. You will also never find me condemning anyone for ever reason, including anyone who lashes out in “resistance.”

After all, I accept everything I can. Obviously, many of you choose to kill and deceive as part of some power strategy, and I’m sure your moves can seem forced. Everyone knows you just did what you had to.

For me, there can still be a crucial gesture of No! But it should not be understood negatively, as being critical or outside of something considered bad. We are all inside now.

Moreover, there is permeability of influence to be had. There are plenty of people out there who can be got to, influenced in all sorts of subtle ways to reconsider their positions to be more in line with beloved community.

There is of course an impossibility of articulating what one should be for. This is because the point of any symbol like that is to stand in for a place for you, the person who appreciates that symbol. So in a way, Palestine becomes a rallying point for all sorts of aggrieved people. Just as Russia might become another rallying point, and so on.

Yet all of these sorts of symbols are partial. Being for them implies being against their enemies. This must be so because of how these sorts of symbols are articulated. Russia is not merely Russia, it is a kind of thing, a nation. It’s completely different to understand something as a kind of something else as opposed to just feeling it. The latter is like what Budhadasa would call Dhamma language.

And it’s in this sense that I think of flourishing, beloved community. I don’t even really think of trust. What’s good about the concept of trust is that it implies uncertainty. If I just know what you’re going to do, I don’t trust you. Trust is sort of a wry thing where I have to know very well that you might defect, but I really think you won’t. It’s not even about duplicity. Remember the call of the void. The weird temptation just to sabotage the crucial plan. It sounds ridiculous but that kind of thing has led to numbers of deaths only the dead can count.

We should get into it: what is flourishing? What is love? Part of what I was getting at before is that love must expand to fill the container. Just because we get along, there’s going to be problems from outside. So getting involved and setting up the whole social affairs is part of any person or group getting along. If there’s no power, you can’t get along. You are invested in these global resource systems, too. You have an interest in it as well.

So it’s better to talk about these things as if you are on the hook. This resistance stuff smacks of never thinking you’re actually going to win, so there’s no need to actually think about taking over. Therefore you can take for granted that your “enemy” will always win, and therefore always be there for you to define yourself against. Therefore “resistance” is a stable category since it’s not really antagonistic with anything.

Which is fine, I’m not advocating antagonism. What I’m advocating is involution, the complicating of things. Not that “all sides” should get along, but that the distinctions between sides will continue to blur and that this is entirely fitting and proper. It is scary for all of us to be implicated with each other.

Where I think there could be a place to start is to realize that all the aggression people mete out can be thought of as seeking recognition for themselves. We can sit here and say no one is entitled to recognition, but these freezing people out leads to vengeance. It’s the kind of thing we can’t afford anymore. It’s just that it seems so impossible to people that you could actually have a considerate and emotionally intelligent populace.

But the point is let’s think about ancestor worship. How do I think about my grandfather who was in the SS? Or those that owned slaves? Or the countless ancestors I have that were rapists, and killers, and so on? We have a lot of ancestors, mind you.

We have to bring an air to our reverence of our lack of innocence. We are also zombies eating the guts of the universe along with a dozen other ripping out the entrails as fast as we can.

That said, we can basically see that we’re making a mess and we need to get our kicks in a more conscientious way while making sure no one gets too carried away. And yeah, we can take the keys and shift some priorities. But it’s not ultimately resisting anything. Even better is to be like AC/DC: “nobody’s putting up a fight.”

To instead aspire oneself to be the irresistible one, and the shift in paradigm is from irresistible in the martial sense to in the sense of attraction. It’s about building a way of life and community which people see as a luxury good because you’re having so much fun. How can they join? No problem, just level up and see that for any of us to flourish, all of us do.

That means of course beloved community is in some sense not operative until all sentient beings are included. Our joy is always countenanced by our grief for all those who are not present, who are not enjoying their experiences, who feel shut out and forgotten or scorned.

For me, the power of spirit is greater than worldly power. What I mean by this is that the crucial moment will always be when someone is being threatened with death or something horrible so that they will go along with what someone else wants them to do that they really don’t want to do. And in that moment, the best thing is to accept the consequences and do what you must. It’s these sorts of gestures, from people who could be in some intelligence agency, or could be wrapped up in some drug gang, or maybe in an abusive relationship.

We all face these sorts of tough choices. It’s toughest when we feel alone. That’s why I want to build up some kind of conversations around me with people who not only want to change things, but also feel personally responsible for seeing it through, and having an analysis that amounts to more than repeatedly drawing lines to the same bad guy over and over again.

I want to see pan-syncretism. Beloved community means bringing out all the Lego pieces, sharing all our stories, weaving a tapestry that can hold them all and wanting eagerly to find out what treasures of memory lie in everyone, what wonderful crossover inside jokes we can make once we feel welcome enough to open up.

With respect to the martial situation, I understand that people are fighting. I don’t blame anyone for shooting back, and I understand that there are uncertainties which can make what seem like pre-emptive strikes seem necessary.

I will simply say to you there again that killing your way to security is not going to happen. It’s not necessarily a political solution so much as an anthropological one. To get out of a deadlock, you have to change your perspective and they have to change theirs. Therefore it is your task to change that other person, but maybe not in any specific direction. You’re just trying to drive them off a track that is irreconcilable with yours, and meanwhile going over your dogmas again and again to see where you have space to move (you’re telling me you can’t move on pasta?).

In conclusion, I don’t like the logic of resistance because it seems undignified. I find it more honorable to assert oneself as co-equal. It also means having one’s own initiatives and vision. I would advocate that instead of simply attacking the symbols often used by those who mete out harm and stifle possibilities while things could be so much more amenable, those of creativity and conscience should undertake to design their own conceptual sculptures, living (and dying) sculptures, vehicles capable of ferrying such trinkets across the river Styx.

My own preferred way to do this is to find crossover themes among many different cultural traditions and basically build up a story-of-stories that amounts to explaining how we had to go through this period of fighting and indignity because of distrust and technological arms races. But now the adventure is one of the soul. We are forced—as Lewis black would say, like we are a little dog and the universe is turning our head to force our nose onto a screen—we are forced to look at all the atrocity, the places where we must change, do better, confront the unknown. Do things we have never done before and connect with others in a way we never knew possible.

I see instead that we are all explorers, even all the founders of our own new lineages. As artists, as creatives. And our lineages overlap in our co-creations. We must overcome everything the resisters resist is we are not all to perish, but so too much we overcome these resisters own dogmas.

Only in that way can that part of us which is in love with life and which enjoys creating joyful situations be encouraged, and learn to wield all our other aspects as implements in some greater game than empire.