Hygiene: Washing and Brainwashing

  • 2024/07/05 23:07

This zine critically examines the origins of being “clean”

Hygiene_Washing & Brainwashing pdf

Education as the Domestication of Inner Space

  • 2024/01/19 19:01

From back cover:

“We are taught since early childhood that everything in the world exists in a food chain as a “resource” to be consumed by those higher up the chain and concurrently as the consumer of “resources” that are lower in this predatory hierarchy. We are also told that life in the wild is hungry, fraught with mortal danger and that civilization has spared us a short and brutish existence. As children, we thus come to believe that life in civilization is good for us, in fact even indispensable for our very survival…”

“…Since civilization is rooted in the appropriation of food and “natural resources” as well as of slave labour (dogs, horses, cows, women, miners, farmers, et al), all of our institutions today inadvertently cater to these constructs and the needs that have been generated by this monocultural perspective. That is why every contemporary institution or company has a department of “human resources” and is thereby linked to managing, killing, and protecting the ownership of “natural” and other resources.

Hence, everything, including humans, became “professionalized” and thus divided into gendered, ethnic, racial, and other categories specializing in specific spheres of labour thereby falling into defined niches of the “food chain”. Language reflects these categories and naturalizes oppression. For instance, in European languages, humanity is conflated with maleness. The word “woman” allows us to unconsciously accept that womanhood entails an aspect of humanness which erases our (female) animality thereby excluding the depersonified nonhuman animals from the privileges accorded to some animals (a small group of primates) by belonging to “humanity”. Moreover, by separating these categories of humanity, animality, femaleness, maleness, race, ethnicity, et al., language veils the racist, speciesist, and patriarchal essence of civilization where human and nonhuman women have been relegated to a class specializing in the production of human and nonhuman resources.”

Education As The Domestication of Inner Space pdf

Baedan: Queers Gone Wild (An excerpt from Baedan: A Journal of Queer Nihilism issue 1)

  • 2017/09/14 20:33

Text from back cover:

““ If we can determine anything from our project of queer negativity, it is that capitalism has an unlimited capacity to tolerate and recuperate any alternative politics or artistic expression we could imagine. It is not a political negativity that we must locate in our queerness, but rather a vicious anti-politics which opposes any utopian dreams of a better future residing on the far side of a lifetime of sacrifice. Our queer negativity has nothing to do with art, but it has a great deal to do with urban insurrection, piracy, slave revolt: all those bodily struggles that refuse the future and pursue the irrationality of jouissance, enjoyment, rage, chaos. Ours is not the struggle for an alternative, because there is no alternative which can escape the ever-expanding horizons of capital. Instead we fight, hopeless, to tear our lives away from that expanding horizon and to erupt with wild enjoyment now. Anything less is our continued domestication to the rule of civilization.”

Baedan_Queers Gone Wild pdf

Industrial Domestication: Industry as the Origins of Modern Domination

  • 2017/09/11 09:20

Text from the zine:

“The term industrial revolution, commonly used to describe the period between 1750 and 1850, is a pure bourgeois lie, symmetrical to the lie about the political revolution. It does not include the negative and flows from a vision of history as uniquely the history of technological progress. Here the enemy deals a double blow, legitimizing the existence of managers and hierarchy as unavoidable technical necessities, and imposing a mechanical conception of progress, which is considered a positive and socially neutral law. It is the religious moment of materialism and the idealism of matter. Such a lie was obviously destined for the poor, among whom it was to inflict long lasting destruction. To refute it, it is sufficient to stick to the facts. Most of the technological innovations that allowed factories to develop had previously been discovered but remained unused. Their widespread application was not a mechanical consequence, but stemmed from a historically timed choice which was made by the dominant classes. And this choice was not so much a response to a concern about purely technical efficiency (which was often doubtful) as it was a strategy of social domestication. The pseudo-industrial revolution can thus be reduced to a project of social counter revolution. There is only one type of progress: the progress of alienation.”

industrial-domestication pdf

An Obituary for Identity Politics

  • 2017/09/07 21:08

From back cover:

“Rather than taking aim at identity itself and the apparatus maintaining this paradigm, energy is spent tearing one another down, ignoring the complexity of individual uniqueness, and playing the State’s role of defining each other based on membership to identity categories. Embracing a particular identity only reaffirms that identity’s existence as a ‘universal truth’ – and therefore, by the colonial intentions of assigned identity, the servitude and enslavement of some to others as a universal truth as well…

…I refuse to participate in upholding enslavement as a condition of my existence, and therefore these ‘truths’ are nothing more than political works of fiction…

…These ‘truths’ are the social constructs of control, keeping the life of rebellion shackled in a cold well of reform.”

An Obituary for Identity Politics pdf

The Reproduction of Daily Life

  • 2017/09/07 01:50

Text from the zine:

“The everyday activity of slaves reproduces slavery. Through their daily activities, slaves do not merely reproduce themselves and their masters physically; they also reproduce the instruments with which the master represses them, and their own habits of submission to the master’s authority. To men who live in a slave society, the master-slave relation seems like a natural and eternal relation. However, men are not born masters or slaves. Slavery is a specific social form, and men submit to it only in very particular material and historical conditions.”

The Reproduction of Daily Life pdf