We do not use any system of classification for our posts … or thoughts. We write about whatever picks our curiosity at the moment and we publish it in waves, when the desire and mood are propitious. This does not mean that we are indiscriminate; we have projects, hypotheses and interpretations that we pursue with constant and meticulous curiosity. But we do not feel the desire to categorise them in any particular manner, except under the nebulous name “agro-nihilism”.

To refuse labelling our productions is a coherent choice: our “no hashtag” ethics is part of our experiment in refusal. It follows questions that we find important: “Could we stop depending on pointers when we search around for intensities? Can we break free from the governing apparatuses that train our desire to automatically react to labels, categories, hash tags, etc.?” A tag that picks your curiosity is almost always the trigger for a libidinal reflex, a Pavlovian bell ring that summons a response from a desire conditioned by the Spectacle.

In the past 200 years, the Spectacle[1] assumed control over shaping and managing our vocabulary, mythologies, fantasies, narrative forms, aesthetic canons and thrills…  Our curiosity, joys and passions have been centralised, standardised, and copyrighted. We err in a libidinal ecosystem that is nothing but an intensive GM monoculture managed by a handful of multinationals, plus an ever-pullulating flock of “alternative” scenes remarkable only for their docility and predictability. Our desire craves junk food, our intensities are disciplined by bureaucrats of pleasure.

The central question for these bureaucrats of pleasure is: “How to make the drastic impoverishment of intensities seem like a vital and dynamic ecosystem, a lush and unexplored territory?” Well, by creating a fake diversity out of the few libidinal templates available. And here’s where categories and labels come in handy: to mask uniformity, simply multiply the categories under which this uniformity is stocked, wrap these tired few products in a mind-boggling variety of packages, make irrelevant variations seem like revolutionary paradigm shifts and, taking advantage of the red fish memory you have encouraged in your subjects, regularly reinvent the wheel. The supermarket of enjoyment and desire that is the Spectacle behaves like any of its peers: it stocks a precise and predictable range of things, all produced according to the same technologies, standards, regulations and imagination, while mimicking an inexhaustible “diversity”. The inevitable packs of pretzels come in ever-evolving rainbows of “subcategories”.

This libidinal supermarket has the same logic as the governing apparatuses of  liberal “multiculturalism”. The contemporary subject is offered endlessly cascading categories of everything to identify themselves with – “race/ethnicity”, “culture”, sexual practices, life-styles, cuisine, fashion, music, art, cybernetic “communities”, forms of body modification, diets, political parties, festivals, self-help techniques, sports, disciplines of self-care and body-care, cars, “counter-cultural currents”, holiday destinations and so on…

This proliferation of “categories of the self” masks the modern subject’s standard-issue form of life. The citizen browses the infinite scroll of labels in search of themself, driving on one of the libidinal highways of the Spectacle towards the final destination : becoming who they are supposed to be. They follow the road automatically, naturally, without ever feeling that they are obeying trajectories, rules, pit-stops and destinations designed by someone else, that they are a dot with predictable behaviour on the network of pleasure. They savour the wind in their hair, the exhilarating speed and smoothness of the drive, the feeling of individuality, freedom[2] and adventure it gives them. The smallest thought of stepping outside the highway is absent.

In such a world, our passions have the rigidity and solemnity of the exhibits, tables and “systems” that describe life in “natural life” museums [3].

But what if, instead of using systems of categorising, our enjoyment would follow the logic of maps drawn during intoxicated dreams? So here is our map:

• Musings, more or less erratic… Here you can find our lengthier, more belabored thoughts.
• Calls and Snippets   Here you can find our more urgent messages.

P.S. M.E.K.A.N. is anti-copyright. Spreading, collage and generally putting the materials on this site to good use is encouraged.

[1] The Spectacle is an apparatus we ourselves gradually try to understand and a tool we gradually learn to use, because we feel that its classical framing (Debord, etc.) needs to be reworked.

[2] Tiqqun have a description of the highway as the perfect dispositif.

[3] It is not a coincidence that the petty bourgeoisie, in its comic aspiration to  “erudition” and “culture”, loves museums oh so much.