War Communism

When I was 19, I rented a house in Liberty, South Carolina. It was a small, rural town of around three thousand people. I rented a small 2.5 bedroom house plus a shed with a number of friends (~10 people rotated in and out over the years, most of them also transgender). I lived there for a bit over 3 years. I often struggle to explain this period. I speak of it in a confusing, traumatized, often paradoxical manner. There was so much magic. Every day was full of dozens of little miracles, miraculating forces swirling in the smoke. The ground is alive! It was so miserable. It was violent. It was volatile. It was overcrowded and also so lonely. I have never experienced the level of solidarity or grace that I felt there, and at the same time it was one of the most painful periods of my life defined by constant turbulence, precariousness, betrayal. We understood our situation in terms of a kind of sacred and profane division, constantly preoccupied by the quasi-Gnostic drive to escape what we understood to be a poisonous, hateful, cruel socius. The power derived from our otherness was commensurate with the pain inflicted on us by the big Other, by familial estrangement, by drug addiction, by religious queerphobia. We were on a kind of frontier, experimental family discovering what our bodies were really made for, carving out new selves from shambling accumulations of excess and disjunction. And, of course, the center could not hold.

I have come to understand this paradox to be an expression of the contradictions underlying the autopoietic foundations of trans existence, and more broadly of the impossibility of an Outside. I see the same patterns repeat across countless contexts in every place I’ve lived. We made some really beautiful things together. But keeping each other alive, or even building a common infrastructure to advance our lives, cannot be conflated with overcoming the foreclosure of our lives. Composing a subject capable of even expressing its needs is no small task in the face of such a collapse as estrangement from the people who always claimed to love you most, coupled with the broader material and social fallout of transition. I will refrain from the gory details, but so often we hurt each other so badly. So often it was the wounds that formed the basis of solidarity that led to the breakdown, but it would be too simplistic to reduce it all back to this. Drug addiction is never really about the wound, nor the addiction itself; the knot takes on its own complex life which is irreducible to the conditions of its existence. What can be said is that the paradox of transsubstantiation of a life lived only on the margins is a volatile, fragile, tortured process which struggles to avoid collapsing into interpersonal violence when put up against the imperatives of the Outside (rent, family, transphobia, etc). So how do we escape the accumulation of petty resentment, bitterness, and external crises which relentlessly haunt our attempts to claw a way Outside? Even more complicated, these crises often accumulated not due to runaway misplaced aggression, but a stifling of aggression and self assertion within the sacred interior counterposed only to a totalizing Outside. There is no simple computation of individual or collective need, there is no eliminating aggression. So how do we summon the grace required for negation of negation under wartime conditions, with the pressure of the epoch pushing so hard against us it risks dissolving us to nothing. This is not some hypothetical, we watched countless friends be ground to dust, lost to ODs, pushed to homelessness and disappeared one day, stolen from themselves in countless ways. So we built a kind of war machine, a rogue factory producing for itself. But here is the paradox: we found a way to solve for our basic subsistence. Each month it was close, but we always made rent. We always had food, every morning the kitchen was full of music as we took turns playing chef. We had artistic, technical, social flows like never before. And yet, like every commune we’d tried, it couldn’t support its own weight. Anxiety and resentment mounted, the security afforded by the arrangement actually exacerbated the existential angst over time, as refuge became stunting. No one knows what they need. The determination of life is not a question that can be resolved contra the broader socius. We were always doomed to the very miracle that we’d prayed for.

Surfaces spawned from nothing. Multiplication of eyes by proliferation of borders. But still the mysticism only serves to accelerate the stabbing of bodies. The “I” we need comes from the outside, but only as a series of haunting questions, never an answer. What are we to do with our innumerable bodies? “To see with all the eyes that one can hold”, that is the challenge of the Eternal Return. The will to power is a question of the protocols of solidarity just as much as a form of self assertion.

Prior to this period, my best friend/housemate and I had spent some time living on an off-grid anarchist commune in rural Tennessee. The premise was familiar: the socius is poisonous, sobriety is hard to maintain living in the shadow of a foreclosed life dominated by wounds and material insecurity, there isn’t anything for me in this world (dressed in elaborate Marxist garb), let’s find an out. And we did, for a while, but everything has a way of catching up to itself. But, all the problems aside (which I will refrain from going into till a later article), we were very inspired by the sheer capacity of labor liberated from the given socius. We were inspired by watching groups of a few near strangers assemble decent housing, feed themselves at scale with small-scale farming and dumpster diving, construct themselves novel shelters ranging from converted school buses to proper homes. This would inspire a rabid, frantic faith in our capacity to summon something out of nothing, to bootstrap a life, to work beyond and despite the axes on which our lives were taken from us. We built machines. We built gardens, we grew mushrooms and plants, we gave hundreds of pounds of food to churches all over the area every season. We did politics. We made great art and music. We were a revolutionary party. It was war communism. There was no breakthrough, there was no light at the end. There was struggle, and when we faltered there was violence. From the outside, between ourselves, and against our own selves. Things fell apart. It is tempting to shrug it all off as doomed adolescent social follies. But we really tapped into something, something so intense that we didn’t know how to hold it. Things fall apart, every struggle thus far has failed. The same is true of love, and I am resolved to keep loving. To build a community capable of constructing a life from scratch without strife (the fundamental ambition of the utopian communes of today and of old), to summon by sheer willpower a world free from the stains of domination, exploitation, traumatic wounding, self betrayal, and violence will be to realize the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. In moments, in fits and starts, we built ourselves a little Heaven. We touched some divine spark which allowed us to rethink ourselves from the ground up, to rethink every axiom around us, to make ourselves into weapons, to go to war against the socius, to destroy what destroyed us but only from a place of true love for what had been disappeared. It expanded, collapsed, reformed, turned over on itself, writhed, vomited. It spawned and then split from a number of other scenes. At times it was art, at times politics, at times philosophy, at times technics. The question of liberation is not about where we end up, we only concern ourselves with building the machine that gets us free. No one said it was gonna be easy.

In the Gnostic cosmology, there is a being on the edge of the world known as Sabaoth, lord of Forces. He is associated with both the ceaseless churning and binding of matter, with the immanence of movement, with the roaring of the sun and the movement of the ocean. He is, in some sense, the being which ensures “nature’s restless nature-ing” (Spinoza). Sabaoth is said to be the child of the Demiurge, the progenitor of this spoiled, wasted world defined by domination and foreclosure. In both texts concerning the origin of the world preserved at Nag Hammadi it is said that Sabaoth ultimately betrays his father, thus allowing Sophia, divine Grace, to reenter and persist in the world. The genesis of Grace is Restlessness. Grace is endless discourse, never relief. We still have faith in the world to come, and we have no need of a clean break. History speaks to us only when we cease to understand to whom it is addressed. We do not wish to place ourselves outside of time, outside of the social, outside of language; we only hope to find the Grace needed to commune with the Subaltern without violence. We believe that another world is already here, that it did not wait for us, that it is buzzing in-between frames of reference. We do not believe in a simple liberation of desire, we have tried it and we only found word salad. We do not lack for variety, we lack a body which can hold it all. We do not wish to be free from structure and we have no faith in simple emergence. We do not want to be aliens in our own world: we demand mediation. In our best moments we discovered, on the margins of the social and outside even ourselves, a grace capable of speaking to it all, of miraculating the bodies we needed. Being has no horizon, it isn’t a frontier, it is the Ground. Ground is a question, as well as a demand, not a given. All we need is time, and we intend to win it.