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Angels of the Revolution
An exploration into the ontology of e-revolution

Balladic accompaniment: Carmen and the Red Detachment of Women (Gershwin theme cuts in briefly at 2:50)





Introduction

Glorious cultural uprisings in eRepublik occur from time to time. Perhaps this happens less so now than in the past. But still, our latest batch of new arrivals in the eUSA, grouped around the Ajay Fanatics and Allies (AFA) party, continues to play on this theme.

I believe there is a kind of continuous discourse (I hesitate to call it a theory) promoted by disappointed leaders of glorious uprisings and even more cynically exploited by others. We can detect it if we read carefully between the lines.

Call this Ajay psycho-therapy, if you like, but I believe the pathologies noted here are actually much more widespread than evidenced by the latest Pizzist variety.

The theologians with whom I am grinding this particular battle-axe I would characterize as those who either truly perceive themselves to be -- or promote themselves as being, whether they believe it or not -- "on the side of the angels".

It all goes something like this...



The Nature of Glorious Uprisings, in General
Particularly regarding sectarians on the side of the Angels

In their finest manifestations of spiritedness, great cultural and political eruptions are said to be by no means a process, a politics, or anything whatsoever pertaining to our e-world.

Such insurrections, it is said, are of the spirit.

They are grounded in an ontology of the Two: the Rebel stands up, not even against the Master, but elsewhere altogether.

Some peripheral evidence of this can be gleaned from our present impasse in the "ships passing in the night" quality of public discourse between the the pro-AFA and anti-AFA camps. It reveals and reinforces a disconcerting linguisitic situation, where North American memes, spelling and humor seem to move away from their Balkanic broken-english counterparts like particles backing off from the counter-force of an ambient field.

It has the quality not so much of a clash as a cultural distancing. And the fact that it is not (really) a clash, as outlined in more detail below, is quite revealing.




Or is it?...

The putatively eternal essence of this world of Uprising is eternal contemplative insubordination, one in which no master will proffer his organizing discourse any more, ever. The Angelic players of the Glorious Uprising postulate that revolution is nothing if it is not the instance of Absolute Liberty, the vanishing of any and all effects of domination.

Grorious, eh?

It is a perspective that linearly extends the bürger-democratic revolution; it is the Great Democracy, the abolition of tyranny all the way down to its concept. And any endeavour, even in close proximity to the Glorious Uprising, which restores in actual fact a new mastery -- above all, when it claims to be part of the revolution -- then becomes the specific form taken by the e-world of the master who must be put to the test by (but only tested by) the Rebel.

Thus, in this narrative, glorious cultural uprisings may be seen to have two distinguishing but inseparable features:

* The Glorious Uprising itself is fundamentally spiritual, an angelic assumption of the Rebel, the advent of the Other New World, Absolute Liberty detached from the e-flesh and from e-death, eternal.

* The Ideological revolution, which is the renewal of the role of master, brings a re-inscription onto this e-world following the storm; novelty, to be sure, but it is the novelty of the cultural counter-revolution.






This type of distinction runs through all e-spirituo-religious and e-politico-nationalist discourses that touch on rebellion.

The genius of an ideological revolutionary is to make his or her move in the closest possible proximity to a massive spritual revolution. In this way, ancient history is ruptured and all subsequent popular heresies become referants of the break, as defined by the ideologist.

The ideological revolution is that through which the power of absolute alterity (that is, the radically alien consciousness) of the Rebel changes the world of the Master, so as to restore a homogenous submission. To invert rebellion into absolute submission: such is the trap set up for the rebel by the new masters and their new discourse.

This is an ancient story.

Consider the spiritual insurrection of the poorest of the poor at the dusk of the ancient r-world. Such hatred, the absolute liberty of primitive vagarancy, the fury of egalitarianism and contempt for the world of hierarchy: all this was captured and enslaved by monks, themselves schooled in rebellion, and rewritten as absolute obedience to the Superior, a need for hierarchy: a mandate for the divine order of a radically unified world order.

Such are our monks today. I leave it to the dear reader to identify who, at any given juncture, is the Master awaiting the juncture to re-inscribe Order on the e-World. My goal isn't so much to point fingers as it is to unveil patterns and posibilties, to think it through...




We can observe that one category clearly supports the very point of inversion between these two distinguishing poles: that of Work.

Monks dig in the garden. Revolutionary guards and volunteers go out to the countryside to clear the virign soil. Of course, I am referring to their eRep equivalents: the grunt-work of game mechanics.

Those who most acutely self-perceive as representatives of the other world inevitably -- it seems -- will quickly volunteer to chain themselves to the most menial of chores on e-earth. The ideological revolution is precisely the means by which they manage to take on such chores by their own free will, caught up in the semblance of the institutionalization of revolt that is revolutionary ideology.

From a psychological perspective, it is entirely understandable that many of those caught up in the spritual tumult and its subsequent ideological lock-down should feel disappointed.

Having departed for Unlimited Revolt on the advent of Glorious Other-Thinking, full of righteous indignation at revisionist semblances, the Rebels find themselves again made stupid, reciting idiotic slogans and bowing to an absurd coterie of adventurer-'leaders'.

A sad story indeed, from which few return and for which, we can imagine, vast mental detours are required in order to clarify the path taken.







Perhaps An Angel Really Has Passed?
Who is 'The Angel': the masses of disenfranchised players, or the pseudo-'leader-intellectuals' of the Revolt?


The absolute idealist claims that the real is nothing but discourse. Or to put a different way: that the e-world is just a fantasy. In the topsy-turvy world of eRepublik, an absolute idealist may well be a thorough-going, hard-nosed materialist. However, that is not necessarily the same thing as a hard-core game mechanist, who is also an absolute idealist, but one with a very serious attitude about fantasy and who may or may not give a hoot for the love of thinking.

The thoroughly modern e-fascist lives by the slogan: "Thought is 100% reactionary if not accompanied by the hatred of the vast majority of disenfranchised players." But facism is not up for discussion here, so let's draw a line there and not continue with any more discussion on e-fascism per se.

However, could we not rather usefully say the opposite? That an anti-fascist text (or attitude in a revolutionary) radically negates all political biology, evacuates all naturalism, and flushes out any and all proto-fascist abjection (servility, humiliating wretchedness) hiding behind the undifferentiated apologies of enjoyment related to hatred for the 99%?

In this sense, there can sometimes be much to like in the pontifications of the Angels.

A furious demand for morals. The indictments against Sade-like trollish behaviors. The railing against complacency and relatively sound critiques of the worst of the masters. It is satisfying indeed when the sectarians of the Angels criticize pseudo-theories as mere programs for spiritual fascization.

We must be careful, though. We must distinguish the red thread in these stories.

A well-centered history does not falsify the force and novelty of the Great Cultural Uprisings. It traces the course of the revolutionaries rather than dealing in their oblivion. Such works are the watchmen of an irreducible fidelity to the revolt, of the other thing of which many have caught a glimpse, and they tell a story not simply of yet another misstep into the sand before the rising tide of bürgery rewards.

Those who stand steady on the question of revolt may even, on the basis of such unprecedented experience thus legislate philosophy to the masters and not -- as usually happens -- the other way around.

Still. There often seems to be good reason to be pessimistic. Player-human nature can indeed seem to be rooted in a multitude of pathologies grounded in a hopeless desire for an always out-of-reach satsifaction. It seems that, in some ways, the "better angels of our nature" -- when turned into a political discourse by Angelic interlocutors -- can often lead to a sense of fatalism, of impossibility, nostalgia; in short, to an inevitable disappointment.

We will come back to this point in a bit.






Despite that, a few do courageously draw the lesson that another world must be found.

But again, we tend towards disappointment, don't we?

Even with those few, this noble wager of fidelity, whose grandeur we measure against the vast majority's self-abasement under the e-iron rule of the new and improved bürgers, is seen to progress uncomfortably and, after all is said and done, tends to change over into a quasi-desperate kind of prophecy: a millenarian Expectationism proclaiming the suffocated slogan:

"The Angel must come."

The bedrock of an idelible popular upheaval evaporates into an empty allegory of the Return.

The Rebel is not at work in the e-world at all; he is a Dreamer, a Visitor, whose ethical nihilism takes over from the audacity of the original wager.

What are we to make of this tendency for even the "better angels" to descend into cyncicism?




"The Juche idea defined man as the master who dominates the world..."
(Kim Jong Il: On the Juche Idea, p. 74)


The Psychology of Radical Impossibility
A brief digression into psychological theory

There is a well-founded psychological theory that explains all this. It was expressed quite succinctly by a certain Doctor, in 1969, to a crowd of revolutionaries, thusly:

"What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one."


The main point of the theory is that Master will negate any world that does not engage in the following discourse....

The logical chain of the discourse goes something like this:

Man is sex and language.

Desire is articulated under the law of the signifier.

The signifier's leverage is its lack of any substance: it will always "castrate" you.

Castration renders equivalent desire and law and seals destiny; desire of Other always follows the rule of Same.

The object presents itself only as absence; desire yields under the master-signifier, the signifier of lack.

The body is sexuated only under the law and disposed by the discourse of the Master.

Q.E.D.: Rebellion, in its desire for the Other, is desire of absolute submission.


Don't be shocked. This is just a re-statement, in neo-Freudian terms, of an ancient Greek idea.


This standard narrative is reflexively adopted -- in one form or another -- by nearly all Rebels and Revolutionary Ideologists, as well as by the noble but sad Historians of Expectationism.






Rebuttal
Rejecting the ontology of the Two and making affirmative scissions

How, then, is revolution possible?

Everything is derailed almost immediately when such a question is posed because there is no e-reality to the question itself.

The revolution is.

Historically, in a sense, it is the only thing that is, since its adversaries have no internal political being except by opposition to it: counter-revolution.

Appealing to the fictive figure of the beyond, which is the mind-turning trick of our Angelic hosts, consists in interrogating any and all Great Cultural Uprisings from the point of their impossibility, and thus raising the question of their existence, which leads to establishing this existence in non-existence: in another world, a beyond, in the Kingdom of the e-Angels.




Osmany Ramon, legendary e-revolutionary leader of the Socialist Freedom Party

The revolutionaries, on the other hand -- which is to say, the Ramonist-PQists :/ -- reject the ontology of the Two to begin with. The e-world is the one averred in the revolution. Do not search for another one, not even that of the inevitable counter-revolution, whose own internal laws we can also decipher from the sole point of view of our (materialist and negative-dialectical) reality.

The Great Cultural Uprisings of eRepublik have not been encircled, enclosed, quasi-unintelligible exceptions. They are e-reality itself; they are that from which all e-reality proceeds.





In the order of the history of the e-world, revolt is first and the master second. The intelligence of the e-world is not embodied in the Law, but in Antagonism. No psychological balance sheet of the Great Cultural Uprisings is possible, only an impossible balance sheet.





A subjective and empty memory of such storms will leave one suffering from intellectual contrition, with a pain in the e-soul, with tears emerging from the incredible narcissistic realization that the revolution is not, after all, about the leaders and intellectuals after all.

For such professors and preachers, the madness of the extenuated body and the unravelled mind become the privileged and negative content of their experience, thus assuring the permanence of an ordinary intellect in them.

But the revolution for the rest of us is not about renouncing; it is an affirmative scission (a break, a separation, a revealing, an uncovering, a discovery).

The process is not a sort of aristocratic conviction that revolutionary militancy is first an absolute mental break, followed by spitting on oneself and performing an internal purge.

Trying to vindicate such a negative figure reduces revolutionary history to a demand for a return to yesteryear's enjoyments. It is an opera bouffe depicting the frantic will of the bürger-thinker to survive the social upheaval in a tragic-imaginary representation of dispossession. Funny, perhaps, and a bit sad, but still -- all in all -- a revolt that negates the e-world altogether and, as noted below, puts one on the other sides of barricades from the revolutionary worker-players.






The Error of World-Negation

The ideologism of the remaking of oneself is fascist in its sectarian ambition of absolute purity, of absolute simplicity, of starting anew from scratch.

"From scratch" really means "from the people" -- the players, the working and exploited majority, and their revolutionary core -- in whom such purity and simplicity must urgently and violently be inculcated.

From the Angel to the militarized torturer, there is only a short step. (See my notes on ETA in my previous article.)

In short, the 'negation of the world' is meaningless.



It is necessary to posit, that is, to wager, an other world.



The Angel-revolutionary tirelessly repeats his discourse about Two Worlds; from that point onward everything splits according to this exemplary Manichean ontology, falling neatly into a bürgermeister's balance sheet for the Great Cultural Uprisings: division of the body into sexuated and non-sexuated parts, the second "glorious" one provided by the Master, the first not. And therefore two desires emerge, and so on and so forth, sloping away into various other dualistic piles of nonsense.






Nothing -- especially a Great Revolt -- authorizes a pure Two of metaphysics. The social revolt is an exemplary way to split One, dividing into it into Two, thus revealing what the One has always been -- and the becoming of its own scission.

The good professors of Two oppose (and correctly so) the anarchism of multiple, seeing it as a preparation for a fascism in which any desire whatsoever will do in order to suppress the nation and the people. But they incorrectly see the Two (the world-negation) as capable of protecting the multiple from the universality of the master.

They further oppose the One as a semblance and peversion such as it becomes incarnated into the revisionist project of the social-fascist State in which no desire is permiited, all mass experience is null and void and only the State, as the sole capitalist, produces politics.

Both of these biases are also fictive; their numerology generates a falsified ontology. An Angelic postulation of the Two does not help us to escape the alternating constraints of the Multiple and the One. The arithmetical framing of ontology is the unconditional primacy of becoming as scission.

At the heart of Cultural Uprisings and similar great social movements of players, the antagonism between the game model and its acolytes, on the one hand, and the vast majority of players on the other, becomes actualized.




One way to ensure women's equality



We can see that antagonism is in fact the organizing element because it is absent on the balance sheets drawn up by the various choruses of Angels. They present themselves as the heroes of the heterogenous worlds, but on first approach of some truly effective heterogenous elements, these fine fellow were/are nowhere to be seen.

A fictive politics will always pretend to stick with the majority of or a great section of players and it will seek to circumvent all antagonism. (Those of who you who saw how the Serv political machine worked in New Zealand know what I'm talking about. But this point is not only relevant to the current Srb incursion into our ancestral bürgermeister-land; that's just one stream of bürger-think among many.)

Again. This type of politics does not resolve antagonisms; it perpetuates them (in the Master's favor) through a discourse of peaceful co-existence. It is the very opposite of revolt.

Such mental operations, in the realm of ideas, aim to annihilate the rest of us, the majority of players. In everyday twisting of language, the revolutionary class is first dissolved into the "working class" and then the working class is further dissolved into "the middle class". This is how one gets "disappeared" in a modern country, first in language, then in fact.






The Revolutionary Antagonist

The only way for an e-revolutionary class to exist and construct itself is by dividing itself from the social e-class of exploitation and unionism that spontaneously emerges from the capitalistic and social-fascist cat-fights of each e-nation and then proceed to take control of the whole political world, of the revolutionary politics of the whole nation and of the entire player base.

Great Cultural Uprisings bring this kind of certainty to its extremes and that is why we say that only the e-Revolt is real.



The more mediocre work of critiquing Work itself is, ultimately, the adoption of the categories of the master: a purely 'social' and objectivist vision of the phenomenon of the avatarized and enclosed space of the worker-player.

Such schemes get caught up in the apolitical ideology of the masses of players, transporting everywhere the reduction of the player-worker to its social being, or more precisely, its 'mass' being: which is the fascism of the workshop.



Such an approach will always fail in the face of the "second wave of bürgers": which are the "worker"ist unions, militias and parties.

Let's get it straight. A Great Revolutionary Cultural Uprising has nothing to do with "love of work".


The mystical duality of eternal worlds, combined with ancient and reflexively-pessimistic psychological theories displace the focus of antagonism, which is the locus of the players' natural revolutionary politics that endlessly divides itself from bürger-politics.

The ongoing storms of revolt sharpen the edge that organizes the new New World.


The Angel brings no news that we did not already know; it it just the visitation of the shadow of a shadow.




























Your notes and comments are welcome!