The principle of laughter and the carnival spirit on which the grotesque is based destroys this limited seriousness and all pretense of an extratemporal meaning and unconditional value of necessity. It frees human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities. For this reason, great changes, even in the field of science, are always preceded by a certain carnival consciousness that prepares the way.
Mikhail Bakhtin
Amidst of carnival celebrations, one may be forgiven the loss of memory of ancient celebrations in which the occasion was a moment for the exorcism of all authority: moral, religious, political, social … . That carnival has for the most part been domesticated and commodified is testimony not only to the expansion of capital, but of the of fear of any expression of wild, Dionysian life. Our festivities are often as dead as the merchandise that we consume and the lives that we lead. We seem no longer to know what real fear is, and thus and thus we ignorant of real joy. Our socially induced hunger for security strips us of the courage to live dangerously, even as we celebrate.
In a feeble effort to call forth, through text on a virtual platform, what was and what can still be the ecstasy of ritual transgression, we share below a selection of essays and texts by Feral Faun/Wolfi Landstreicher (the name of the author is ultimately unimportant) on revolution as the struggle to abolish power and liberate creative desire, the chaos that flows through all life.
It would be a mistake read this as an apology for the madness of a permanent carnival; it is instead an animal cry against the chains of society and for permanent possibility of destroying all that is created.
In solidarity: March 8 – The call for a day without women’s work
It is often forgotten that the international March 8th women’s day began with striking female factory workers. The strike, the withholding of women’s work, lies at its origins, and not the docile protests or celebrations of acquired “rights” that would later mark the occasion.
This year’s call for an international women’s strike on women’s day recalls earlier rebellions and repeats a more recent gesture. The aim remains, at one level, protest: of giving voice and calling attention to the violence, exploitation and oppression of women. More significantly, though, it is a gesture of withdrawal from an essentially patriarchal capitalist production and social reproduction; a potentially contagious gesture that resonates beyond simple appeals for recognition and protection by the State.
The danger is that the women’s strike, this year or in the future, limit itself to such appeals (however important they may be for some, at a specific time and place), subsequently falling into one more “dead”, predictable parade of political folklore. If the institutions and relations of patriarchal power can be mitigated, pushed back, by such strikes, it is equally important to remember that it is these institutions and social relations that produce patriarchy and their underlying gendered “ways of life”.
A radical feminism must not only contest the oppression of women, but ultimately, the creation of women as the subservient sex-gender to male-capitalist domination.
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