Roger Farr

“[The poet never] voices received opinions, or gives clear expression to the confused feelings of ‘the masses’: that is the function of the politician, the journalist, the demagogue.”

-- Herbert Read, “Art and Alienation”

“Poetry is the end(s) of politics.”

--L. Mirari, “The Politics of Refusal vs. the Refusal of Politics”

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“One never really contests an organization of existence without contesting all of that organization’s forms of language.”

--Debord, On the Passage of a Few Persons...

If capital must continually decompose and then restructure standardized communication in order to maintain just enough cooperation as is needed to ensure efficient production, then the defection from this campaign in favor of creating autonomous and “unreadable” modes of communication and dissent emerges as a viable, if limited, tactic. Language and communication become critical sites of anarchist critique and experimentation.

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-- drawing by Peter Welleman

Often, when I turn to the anarchist press these days, it’s certain I’ll find someone commenting on the lack of “clarity” in the discourse of the movement. In a recent editorial in Anarchy, for example, Lawrence Jarach writes “there is an overflow of ambiguous (at best) terminology in much contemporary anarchist discourse.”

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