The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
…
The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
… there are some books that allow one to get a glimpse, as is also true of a lesser number of encounters, of a more accomplished world than the present pestilential decomposition.
Abecedarium/Primer – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
Abecedarium/Primer – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 6, 1986)
A abecedarium/a primer is “a small book for teaching children how to read”. Furthermore, a literate person is, according to the definition published by UNESCO in 1962, one who “has acquired the essential knowledge and skills which enable him to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his group and community, and whose attainment in reading, writing and arithmetic make it possible for him to continue to use these skills towards his own and the community’s development”.
What news! how much more important to know what that is which was never old!
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
For anyone who has not renounced the desire for authentic communication, for anyone who is not an impotent intellectual, the real scandal is not the fact that the information technicians lie to us more or less often, but the reinforcement, by way of their falsifications as much by way of their revelations, of our separation from the practical means of truth; a separation that is evidently the origin of the imposture of the communications media and all their particular lies, rather than the unfortunate result of their policies and their interests.
Stupefaction (Abasourdir) – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
Stupefaction – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 5, 1985)
Merely by examining the modern means at its disposal, the process of stupefaction—deafening, “extreme bewildering by means of a loud noise”—leaves us vaguely dazzled by the multiplicity of transmitters that contribute with “noise” of every kind to the stupefying present, to the loss of consciousness of our time. We shall encompass a large number of them under one heading, by tranquilly asserting that all existing information must be considered, by virtue of its most general function, to be socially harmful noise.1
… the reality that we start from is ignorance. This appears to us to be a human faculty whose exercise must be truly familiar and an everyday experience for all our contemporaries; thus, it is a more solid and more easily observable reality than the immense field of knowledge with which they preserve—and we preserve—less direct or more timid relations. Any Encyclopaedia that takes human knowledge as its object and does not begin by asserting and assuming as a general starting point the fact that men are socially separated from that knowledge, can only participate in that popular soup of culture that is nothing but a distribution carried out by specialists of pre-masticated fragments of knowledge that float in a broth of ideology, a distribution that participates in the reproduction of ignorance and its paternalistic maintenance. Instead, our method consists in a development that starts with the immediate sense of privation in the face of science and technology, and with the revolt that this privation inspires; it is a grandiose conception that never loses sight of the totality, and tries to preserve it and to master it; it penetrates directly to the core of unrest in everything that exists and takes nothing for granted.
Preliminary Discourse – Encyclopédie des Nuisances (November 1984)
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of the magazine Encyclopédie des Nuisances (subtitled Dictionnaire de la déraison dans les arts, les sciences et les metiers, in reference to Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers by Diderot and D’Alembert). The project was one of the most significant “theoretical” interventions in the radical critique of Capital of the late 20th century. A collective endeavour, it followed in the footsteps of the Situationist International, though with some distance. The main editors were Jaime Semprun, Miguel Amorós, Pierre Lepetit, Guy Bernelas, Jacques Fredet, François Martin, Pascal Moatti, Jacques Philipponneau, Christian Sébastiani and Jean-Pierre Gomez.
Dedicated to a total and radical critique of capitalism, the authors of the many entries to the Encyclopédie would elaborate a series of analyses and criticisms of different, yet interconnected, dimensions of capitalist social production and reproduction, having always at their centre the “ignorance and dispossession” that animates the whole. Through this exercise, the Encyclopédie sought to keep critical language and the historical memory rebellion against alienation alive, while trying to contribute, however modestly, to the next revolutionary crisis.
Over the course of this month, we will share a series of the entries from the Encyclopédie, for the continuing relevance of its critique and to do our small part in the same rebellion.
We share below the first part of the “Preliminary Discourse” of the first number of the Encyclopédie, of November 4th 1984, preceded by a brief introduction by one of the original members of the collective, Miguel Amorós.
Palestinian workers queue to go through Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem to work in Israel Photograph: Peter Beaumont/The Guardian
With the generous permission of Nika Dubrovsky and the David Graeber Institute, we share an article by David Graeber on his experience and reflection on daily life under Israeli state occupation.
Hostile Intelligence: Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank
Year: 2015
In Nablus, every street seems to have a men’s hair salon. There are literally thousands of them. Most stay open until at least 2 at night; often other than mosques they’re the only places lit up and open at two at night; and it seems any time you pass by one, there are likely to be four or five nicely coiffed young men clustered inside, watching someone get a haircut. The odd thing is that women’s hair salons seem entirely absent. Occasionally you do see impressive posters for women’s cosmetics and hair products; often, the women are blonde (and a surprising number of Palestinians in Nablus are, in fact, blonde; even children), but the shops are absent. I asked a friend why this was. He explained that while Palestinian society was traditionally considered the most liberal Arab society outside of Beirut, and young women never used to go with their hair covered, things started to change in the ‘90s with the political rise of Hamas. But in the case of women’s hair salons, there was another, much more immediate factor. During the ‘80s, Israeli intelligence agents began taking advantage of their existence to spike the sweet tea with knock-out drugs, and take nude pictures of women so as to blackmail their husbands into turning collaborator or informant. So now women’s salons exist, but they’re not visible from the street, and women no longer take tea from strangers.
My first reaction on hearing the story was: Did this really happen? It sounds like the very definition of a paranoid fantasy. But Palestinians in Nablus are living in an environment where insane things do happen; where there actually are people conspiring against them; spies, informants, security forces of a dozen varieties including many with advanced degrees in psychology and social theory do exist and are actively trying to come up with ways to destroy social trust and tear apart the fabric of society. Innumerable stories circulate. Only some are true. How can anyone possibly know which?
Palestinian This name Today more than ever we must pronounce it, articulate it, utter it chant it, shout it, whisper it, sing it Until our last breath This name, this witness Before the night swallows it up forever
I am writing these few words from Beirut, once again under intense enemy fire. And the south of the country, of which there is almost nothing left, and the Bekaa.
In Gaza, the death is so constant, the devastation so relentless, the intention so explicit, there can be no acceptance – only rupture, withdrawal, disorientation. There can be no accommodation with what is happening. And as Israel reaches another sickening summit, what becomes undeniably clear is that the powers that let it all get this far cannot be reasoned with and cannot be shamed. They can only be rebelled against.
We share a 1948 statement from the International Jewish Labor Bund, in New York, after the founding of the state of Israel and an open letter to the New York Times expressing great alarm that Zionists implicated in atrocities were given a warm reception in the United States. Signed by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other Jewish notables.
A Documentary about the 2019 Uprising in Chile, from the CrimethInc. collective (21/10/2024).
Five years in the making, this hour-long film documents the uprising that swept Chile from October 2019 to March 2020, showing how everyday people sustained six months of rebellion by creating extensive networks of self-determination and mutual aid.
This is an inspiring portrayal of the tactics that gave demonstrators control of the streets, the organizing strategies that enabled the movement to act effectively while remaining leaderless, and the importance of time and space in revolt. It is also a cautionary tale about how the government used the promise of a new constitutional process to recover enough legitimacy to regain control. It chronicles a high point of action in a struggle that continues today.
Love, sympathy and self-sacrifice certainly play an immense part in the progressive development of our moral feelings. But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which Society is based in mankind. It is the conscience — be it only at the stage of an instinct — of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.
In March 2020, when the virus raged across the globe but before we in the UK realised how serious and tragically lethal it would become or how much of a long-term problem it would be, Freedom Press published its first Covid-related update on its news site. Titled *Covid Mutual Aid Groups: A List,* the text came out ten days before the first UK lockdown and stated:
“As the global Covid-19 pandemic is upon us, a number of mutual aid groups have started forming across the country. (…) It is estimated that 2-3 people out of a hundred [infected by Covid] will die. We must do everything we can to prevent this from happening. (…) The Tory government is apparently more concerned with making sure the economy won’t collapse than with saving people’s lives. (…) Remember: that old lady you see on your grocery shopping and that comrade you know who is suffering from a long-term illness: it is your job to protect them as much as you can.”
This was followed by a listing, initially very short, of mutual aid groups formed in the previous few days by anarchists who wanted to mitigate the potential hit of the pandemic in their communities rather than rely on the state to do it for them.
A fresco depicting a scene from the Book of Esther: From the synagogue at Dura-Europos, c. 244 CE.
One cannot understand the meaning of what is taking place in Israel today if one does not understand that Zionism constitutes a double negation of the historical reality of Judaism. Not only does it in fact transfer to the Jews the nation-state of Christians, but Zionism represents the culmination of that process of assimilation which, since the late 18th century, has been gradually canceling Jewish identity. Decisively, as Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin has shown in an exemplary study, at the foundation of Zionist consciousness lies another negation, the negation of Galut, that is, of exile as a principle common to all historical forms of Judaism as we know it. The premises of this conception of exile predate the destruction of the Second Temple and are already present in biblical literature. Exile is the very form of Jewish existence on Earth, and the entire Jewish tradition — from the Mishnah to the Talmud, from the architecture of the synagogue to the memory of biblical events — was conceived and lived from the perspective of exile. For an Orthodox Jew, Jews living in the state of Israel are also in exile. And the state according to the Torah, which Jews await upon the coming of the Messiah, has nothing to do with a modern nation-state, so much so that at its core lie precisely the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of sacrifices, which the state of Israel does not even want to hear about.
Encyclopédie des Nuisances: Literacy, memory and the past (III)
The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.
…
The novel is significant, therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
… there are some books that allow one to get a glimpse, as is also true of a lesser number of encounters, of a more accomplished world than the present pestilential decomposition.
Abecedarium/Primer – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
Abecedarium/Primer – Encyclopédie des Nuisances
(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 6, 1986)
A abecedarium/a primer is “a small book for teaching children how to read”. Furthermore, a literate person is, according to the definition published by UNESCO in 1962, one who “has acquired the essential knowledge and skills which enable him to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required for effective functioning in his group and community, and whose attainment in reading, writing and arithmetic make it possible for him to continue to use these skills towards his own and the community’s development”.
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