Ekidna [echidna, she-viper]: The fierce Echidna, a flesh-eating monster, unlike either mortals or the undying gods, half a nymph with glancing eyes and half again a huge snake, great and awful, with speckled skin, who dies not nor grows old all her days. She brings to life fearful monsters: Hydra, the Chimera, the Sphinx, Scylla, the Harpies, Gorgon mother of Medusa and other wicked brood that haunt the nightmares of good citizens. Enemy of order and foe of idolatry, invulnerable to faith, law and guilt, she injects imperial reality with the venom of uncertainty and undoing. And to those who fall into her arms she whispers: “Hope reduces us to salt statues forever gazing, with teary eyes, at the skies from which salvation is supposed to come”.

Playing counter-reality

> I would call the experiment we’ve started last summer one of passionate territorialisation. I desired to do this for a long time, being by now wary of my evasive routine of travelling, nomadism or whatever you want to call it. The exit from the amusement park of bourgeois life will not be found by incessantly moving, I nowadays think, but by standing still: assuming presence in a territory is the antidote to the mixture of obsessive-compulsion, cowardice, cruelty, paranoia and narcissism that the dominant reality sells as ”good life”. For me, there aren’t any golden cities, fabulous lands or ultimate ecstasies waiting in the distance. There is no final secret to be discovered beyond the horizon. There is only the burning anxiety of living and I cannot alleviate it any longer by running around as if my tail was on fire. I will take it on here, on this small territory that I am slowly becoming familiar with.

> I use the term “counter-reality” to describe what we’re trying to do, not only in order to acknowledge that we still self-define in relation to the codes of the dominant reality (and how else would we, since politics are a practice of interacting with existing power relations?); but also because our reality is not complementary to the dominant one, an “organic supplement” to its industrial, corporate, colonial, urban, phallic and spectacular realities. We refuse harmonising our reality into the cheerful liberal-corporatist, “Why can’t we all be friends?” fantasy. If Ekidna and its many sister realities are to really thrive, the dominant reality has to disappear; and vice-versa (respecting the difference of scale, of course, which makes us much less of a threat to them as they are to us). The term “counter-reality”, thus, expresses an antagonism, a confrontation that cannot be resolved within the current coordinates of bourgeois reality.

> Becoming territorialised, for me, is a step towards assuming responsibility for the construction of my immediate reality that is, for my life-shaping practices; and towards refusing to keep on ignoring the dispositifs that, in default (that is, bourgeois) mode, govern these practices.

> If one’s ecstasies are synaptic with the dendrites of the dominant Spectacle; if one’s enjoyment nodes are excited by the impulses released by any of the dominant reality’s nerve centres; or, in a less anatomical vocabulary, if one’s everyday enjoyment happens within the bourgeois apparatuses of fun; then that person has an erotic attachment to the dominant order, irrespective of what one is proclaiming or of the cathartic “radical” political actions one undertakes sporadically[1]. When our daily practices are so obstinately docile – buying stuff in shops, paying rent, working for money under a boss’, manager’s or client’s orders, enrolling in educational programmes, entering intimate relations with authorities or institutions, building a career (activist or professional, it’s the same), travelling, beautifying, vociferating or exhibiting oneself on social media, enjoying commodities, going to the opera, theatre, cinema, museum, bar, restaurant, art gallery, club event or festival, reading a famous book or book review, taking the metro, taxi or Uber car (all of them feed the dominant infrastructures), watching a Netflix series or a pop video, reproducing the bourgeois love templates, etc. – it is obvious that we are still stuck in a passionate embrace with the bourgeois economy.

> I hope that, once territorialised, it will be harder to dissimulate the docility of my everyday practices behind the hollow abstraction of the “great cause” or the “revolution”; and so, I will become unable to perform the part of the rebellious “activist[2]” while living a conformist life, safely nested in the cradle of the dominant dispositifs.

> As we all know, one needs certain resources for experimenting; serious experimentation is blocked by the bourgeois system of scarcity, guilt and resentment that keeps one chasing, always out of breath, after the most elementary crumbs of life. So, I thought, building counter-realities must start from assuring my and my friends’ and accomplices’ access to some kind of resources that will allow us to exit the endless bourgeois cycles of production/consumption, hatred/obedience and despair/elation. And, I also thought (I’m pretty thoughtful!), space is one of these resources. It is not by chance that, from its inception, capitalism was organised as a total war for the control of space (enclosures, colonial invasions, the organization of disciplinary institutions, etc.): it was clear that preventing access to space is one of the basic strategies to prevent the organisation of rebellious realities[3].

> And so, we have used some money that happened our way to acquire a piece of land and a ruinous house in the countryside. We have no clear idea where to start from or where we’ll get. Which is not a bad thing. We’ll start from the obvious: restructuring the house, building some facilities, doing some agriculture, organizing get-togethers, parties and networks. Rather formulaic practices for a project with such high ambitions, you might say. I agree. But there are no ready-made roads or destinations for us; some paths might be traced as we turn our backs on the blinding floodlights of the Spectacle and start finding our way in dark. For the time being, we enjoy wandering through the unpredictable in wobbly flying machines and finding crossroads in which no path is the proper one.

What I expect will happen (although most probably something very different will…)

> Some will say that our experiments have failed from the start, since our premises do not respect the sacred principles of this or that manual of “counter-cultural” good practice[4]. But we do not have time for principles right now. Also, because our approaches to antagonism and struggle are so different from the models of urban activism, our experiences are not directly translatable in the codes, language, practices and hierarchies of city-based militantism. It’s still worth trying to start a conversation, though.

> There is a delicate balance between partially exiting the assisted-life machines of the bourgeois order and entering in direct combat with the forces of order. Unless we turn our backs on the bourgeois economy, we will end up being just another bunch of “discontented” imperial citizens. But, some will say, if we refuse to engage in conflict with the world around us, what we do is no more than playing “retreat to the countryside”. I don’t agree: exit and disappearance are radical political choices and, for me, far better forms of resistance than continuing to be another hopeful extra in the urban Spectacle. Right now, interacting with the dominant reality is not my priority; I could tranquilly watch bourgeois reality’s spastic cycles of eating and shitting from afar, while playing counter-reality with my friends and accomplices. But that does not mean that I wouldn’t also like our playing to create useful anti-bourgeois weaponry, because such weaponry eases an interaction with the dominant order on our terms.

Awful and I know it!

> Since, as already mentioned, we don’t quite know what we’re doing and what to expect, what else is there to do but start boastfully, tracing some imaginary lines of antagonism? We’ll see if I’ll be forced to (boastfully) recant or not. Here are a few short thoughts on what I’m excited about and, typically, much more on things I don’t like, won’t do or don’t care about. From a leftist position, these thoughts might make me seem arrogant, immoral, awful or worse than the enemy. But I’m not a leftist; when I describe myself as an agro-nihilist, alongside the self-irony implied by this mock identity there is a serious effort to exit the idiotic left/right vacillations of bourgeois “democracy”. If you will feel upset by what I say, I don’t have much to add at the moment. If you’re amused by my preliminary list of evilness and immoralities, I would be happy to discuss them further.

I don’t care about …

> Creating a bucolic retreat, countryside sanatorium or work-away option for “burned-out activists” or anyone else. I’m not here to organise retreats or holidays, mine or anybody’s. We need keen accomplices, not people that want to “escape their hectic metropolitan life”, vent out their frustrations or pursue their own Spectacular projects in “nature” before returning to their usual circling around urban neon lights. Orientalist travellers keen to “explore” Sicily will feel especially out of place here. For the people living here together, even short-term, Ekidna must be the main reality, not some exotic escape from their “real life”.

> Plus, there’s nothing idyllic about living on the land – I have enough experience already to know that on the land, away from the Spectacle’s dazzling centres, our fundamental conflicts – anxieties, paranoia, aggressiveness, resentment, the obedient nature of our daily ecstasies – are exposed in the raw. It’s a dangerous place.

> Purity, peace, harmony or the fantasmatic search for the “authentic”.

> Fighting for “social justice”. I find any fantasy that rallies under the banner of “justice” unattractive: it raises the spectre of the Law (of the State, of the Father), of legal codes, tribunals and judges, of the imperial logic of centralisation, order and normalisation. I leave the struggle for “justice” to liberal vigilantes and that for “integration” to the various corporate, corporatist, organic-functionalist or fascist agencies that dream of a harmonious and compliant “society”. That ugly arrangement that liberals keep calling “society” is a product of the combined forces of colonialism, capitalism and the State and must disappear. Placing plasters on its gangrenes signals, for me, not just a desire to enter into a dialogue with the dominant order on the terms decided by its guardians and faithful followers; but, more seriously, a desire for bourgeois society.

> Any activity understood as “work”. “Work, labour, toil, vocation, calling, career etc.” is the cross symbol of this religion of the phallus that we call “modernity”. Invented by the Christian theologians and administrators, “work” as an apparatus of selfhood-production was then taken on with glee by both capitalism and State socialism/communism, perfected and made inescapable. I refuse to be defined, identified or recognised through a practice sanctioned by any of those ethical codes or institutions as equivalent with “personal worth”. I did not flee the city to reproduce here the same obsessions that fuel urban dispositifs: productivity, efficiency, expertise, best practice or competition. As an agro-nihilist I sometimes play thoroughly, meticulously and carefully. I equally enjoy idleness, futility and anti-utility.

> The Spectacle. To captivate is to keep captive: absent-mindedly submitting to the machines that determine the most crucial aspects of one’s life. But the bourgeois Spectacle is not just the arena where the passive spectator is hypnotised by a made-up, “inauthentic” reality concocted by the bourgeois masters of light and magic, as Guy Debord thought. Today the Spectacle, from “radical” art to pornography, from cybernetic interactions to the media, from the mall to the commercial festival and from liberal politics to the pop culture apparatus, is all there is: the only arena where bourgeois subject can obtain being, becoming, identity, selfhood, or whatever you want to call this. There is no reality outside the Spectacle; such places have to be created from scratch and this is what I call “counter-realities”. Any counter-reality worth its name is, to my mind, standing against the Spectacle.

> Forms of self-defining and of interacting with my playmates based on martyrdom or messianic moral/theoretical virtue. This is not an easy task, as we have been lately socialised, by various hyper-identitarian methodologies of personhood and self-worth invented mainly in the USA, to enjoy precisely these forms of being and being with the others. But it is worth a try, because in my experience this kind of self-defining leads to rigid and paranoid social environments[5].

I (sort of) care about…

 > Presence. By presence I do not mean the senile Enlightenment/humanist ontology of (self-)knowing; I mean being aware of the mechanisms that create and regulate our sustenance, care of the self, passions and ventures. To be present means refusing to be carried away like a happy wreck by the flow of the “good (bourgeois) life”. To be present, in other words, means to be aware of how one’s most basic and intimate practices are governed and how they fit (or not) into the dispositifs of the dominant order.

> Invisibility: ruling is happening through the trope of visibility and if one is not visible in the various dioramas and insectariums of liberalism’s “register of identities” they feel they do no exist. New realities can come out of learning to desire invisibility and of inventing ways of being invisible.

> Playing: I hope that most of our time will be spent inventing new games, because good games can help us escape the logic of our habitual, disciplined behaviours. We can invent new worlds while playing, new kinds of interaction, reasoning and enjoying, without other purpose but keeping the excitement going. A good game is presence, with no other finality but itself and no rules or law but those invented by those playing. And ending one good game, out of boredom or exhaustion, does not lead to guilt, despair, burnout or depression, but simply signals the need to invent another game, tomorrow.

  Further agro-nihilist nastiness

 I am adding some musings in the same immoral, anti-social and anti-improvement manner. I grouped them in a different section to repeatedly give the reader who does not enjoy such bad manners the chance to quit reading.

Neither greening of capitalism nor detox of the “proletariat”

> I will not join the jubilant parade of green capitalism. As we all know, the “ethical, local, authentic, healthy, environmentally friendly, small-scale, etc.” production is one of the ways in which the dominant governing dispositifs adapted to the increasingly unliveable environment they have created and it contributes to sustaining the dominant order. Infusing fresh, clean, healthy or ethical nutrients in the veins of the bourgeois regime is not something I find politically exciting. Likewise, the messianic goal of granting access to “healthy” or “ethical” life ingredients to the loyal citizens does not move me. To quote some distant friends, “Under Empire, the difference between the police and the population is abolished. At any moment, each citizen of the Empire can … reveal himself a cop”. Their fate is in their own hands. I only care about my friends, playmates, accomplices and allies and at the moment most of them have willingly abandoned the group of “proper citizens” or “workers”.

I’m into producing food and stuff, BUT…

> It is vital, inspiring and fun to create the conditions of my everyday reality and I became convinced that any radical struggle to become (partially) autonomous from the liberal-capitalist dispositifs must attempt to take (partial) control of these conditions. But it is also true that anyone, loyalist citizens, religious zealots, right-wing survivalists and fascists included, can grow their own food, build their own house and make their own soap (as they can also protest, create occupied social centres, help the destitute, organise alternative festivals or fight the police); however, in the case of fascists, loyalists and so on, the practices that could create a rupture with the dominant dispositifs in fact selectively strengthen various elements of these phallic dispositifs – patriarchy, misogyny, heterosexism, racism, individualism, identitarianism, authoritarianism, competition, militarism, policing, discipline, etc. – and impose them as supreme law within the “community” (when there is one). Such realities are therefore not antagonistic to the dominant one but exacerbations of the bourgeois order, which they usually condemn for not being radical enough in its fascism. Anyway, it follows that creating a counter reality is not simply about creating food, shelter, etc. but about creating new economies[6] of subjectivity and commonality: new modalities of imagining ourselves and of relating to one another; new desires; new life-forms that refuse the templates offered by the dominant reality. I simply think, as discussed, that building such counter-economies requires territorialisation; I hope that Ekidna will allow me to experiment with all of this.

I’ll make money, if need be, BUT…

> Both my friends and I will, at various points, engage in market practices and make money in various ways. But I think it is important to view these practices of self-sustenance as tactical subterfuges, masquerades, performances, undercover or false flag operations and so on. When and if our market practices and our identities as producers of goods for sale become a source of pride or take over our imagination, when our market practices become our enjoyment, then I think that we start sustaining the dominant reality rather than undermining it. At that point, the fundamental rules of bourgeois reality, for example the rule that one’s life has the value of their work, commercial products or market practices, even when such markets are open or clandestine, become inescapable. I know it is a fine line I’m drawing here but at the moment I am weaving using fine lifelines.

I don’t care about the “you’re defecting from the real (urban) struggle to retreat in rural tranquillity” accusation

> There is a type of urban activists that dismiss any contestation of the narrative of the “(oppressed) proletariat” as the epitomal revolutionary agent and of “important struggles” happening inside the city walls[7]. You will excuse me if I do not take such positions too seriously. Firstly, because I don’t care either for the Marxist fetish of the proletariat and revolution or for the phallic, hyper-modernist Bolshevik obsessions with progress, efficiency, truth, order and control. Secondly, because the city, being the historical bastion of the bourgeoisie, is not just the nervous centre of modern governing, but also one of modernity’s most mesmerising ideologies. The myth of the city as the place of liberation, experimentation and revolution must be punctured.

> Currently, the possibilities for developing dissenting counter-realities in the city are, to my mind, minimal. Without the network of corporations, backed up by armed forces, that put products on the supermarket shelves or that provide water and energy, the city dweller dwindles. This might seem like a blunt argument but it needs to be taken seriously as a trigger for rethinking political practice, because ignoring it will make us unable to break out of our infatuation with the very order we stand against. Or, to put the argument the other way around, I find it rather too comfy to focus on various “urban struggles for emancipation” while ignoring the global dispositifs that, to feed the insatiable appetite of the city – for space, food, clothing, water, gas, petrol and electricity, for cotton, synthetic fibres and plastic, for beauty & hygiene, for metals, cement, asphalt, bricks, plaster and glass, for fashion, entertainment and “culture”, for “science and technology” or for “progress” and “change” – suck the life out of communities and ecosystems outside the city walls and squash any serious attempt to live autonomously on those outlands. And, depending on their level of enmeshment in the above-mentioned dispositifs, the urban dweller’s daily practice will involuntarily feed the forces that try to annihilate outlandish realities. To use a very simply example, I an quite cynical about the possibilities of producing all the food a city needs within its walls (city gardens, etc.); and if the urban dwellers continue to expect the peasant of the world, a group that modernity has systematically treated as the wretched of the Earth, to supply them will food, then the worst colonial relations of modernity will be reproduced. .

> Some of our friends will argue that the divide between the city and the “rural” does no longer exist and that interesting alliances can be forged between those inside the city walls and those outside them. Obviously, the urban economy extends everywhere, colonising and shaping the territories it feeds on. And I understand the strategic reasons for talking about alliances. However, I prefer emphasising the non-congruence of the spaces within the city walls with those outside because to my mind, if we are to liberate ourselves from the bourgeois order, then we need to liberate our imagination from the city walls. Such liberation needs outlands, barbarism.

> I might be wrong, of course, but at the moment exodus from the city and destroying the city’s mystique and economies, as improbable as such goals seem, are the ways of countering the dominant dispositifs of control. But, since the city is both the production centre and an effect of the Spectacle, it expertly disguises its control apparatuses behind seductive fantasies of enjoyment and emancipation. I can see why, like so many of my friends, I remained glued to its flypaper for many decades, fluttering my frail wings to exhaustion.

 

[1] Some of these militant practices – that we all know because, by now, they are performed in all “radical” environments, having become some sort of “franchise radicalism” – are exhilarating; some seem to us urgent or necessary. I know this. But I want to point out that by themselves, these practices do not make a dent in the organisation of the dominant reality; nor are they serious experiments with “refusing who we are now” and with “becoming otherwise”. On the contrary: the automatic repetition of these “political” practices has become similar to the Christian practice of confession, a cathartic ritual that absolves the “believer” from their daily sins; and to the ecstasy obtained through “sacred” ceremonies. This is not how I imagine the process of building counter-realities.

[2] What does this term mean anyway? Where does it come from? Why do liberals love it so much? And what is one that is not an “activist”; a “passivist”?

[3] Maybe there are ways of building counter-reality that do not need a space; maybe not. I am not aware of many exciting examples of counter-realities that do not use space as a central resource. Especially for the type of experiments that we are planning, space is fundamental.

[4] As a footnote and maybe as the starting point for a future discussion, let’s mention that certain forms or privatization or, maybe I can call it that, of sovereignty, are not yet completely eliminated even from projects that start from a more favourable position like, say, an occupied space. Most of our occupied spaces, for complex reasons to do with defence against the forces of order or the fascists but not just with that, harbour a sense of ownership, have locks on the doors (including symbolic) and trace boundaries that only selected people are allowed to cross.

[5] Like many of the laconic assertions I am making here, this remains a provocation, as I do not have the space to develop it. We have dealt with some of these issues in more detail on a different platform (www.eukariot.com). And we might dedicate different productions to explaining in more detail what we mean by Spectacle; what we understand by anti-phallic politics and why we want Ekidna to be that; and why we are skeptical of the possibilities to create counter-realities within the city.

[6] I don’t use “economy” like liberals do, to mean the flows of commodity production or finance; but to mean the “organization of reality” or, even better, the “organization of ecstasy”.

[7] The walls I am mentioning, while a reference to the medieval meaning of the term “bourgeois”, also refer to the (often invisible) frontiers traced around and within the city by the various dispositifs that shape its myth as well as its infrastructures, processes, shape, power relations, pleasures, (libidinal) economy and so on.