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# Signals of Disorder Submitted by anon on Sun, 2010-08-01 23:23. Tags: Anarchist Practice Books
Sowing Anarchy in the Metropolis A.G. Schwarz In an article in the recent book, We Are an Image from the Future: the Greek Revolt of December 2008, I briefly made a point that a friend convinced me needs to be elaborated. The idea is that of “signals of disorder,” and their importance in spreading rebellion. As far as Greece is concerned, the argument is that by carrying out attacks—primarily smashings and molotov attacks against banks and police stations, which constitute the most obvious symbols of capitalist exploitation and State violence for Greek society—insurrectionary anarchists created signals of disorder that acted as subversive seeds. Even though most people did not agree with these attacks at the time, they lodged in their consciousness, and at a moment of social rupture, people adopted these forms as their own tools, to express their rage when all the traditionally valid forms of political activity were inadequate. |
An interesting feature of these signals is that they will be met with fear and disapproval by the same people who may later participate in creating them. This is no surprise. In the news polls of democracy, the majority always cast their vote against the mob. In the day to day of normality, people have to betray themselves to survive. They have to follow those they disbelieve, and support what they cannot abide. From the safety of their couch they cheer for Bonny and Clyde, and on the roadside they say “Thank you, officer” to the policeman who writes them a speeding ticket. This well managed schizophrenia is the rational response to life under capitalism. The fact that our means of survival make living impossible necessitates a permanent cognitive dissonance. Thus, the sensible behavior is not to reason with the masses, to share the facts that will disprove the foundations of capitalism, facts they already have at their fingertips, and it is not to act appropriately, to put on a smiley face, and expect our popularity to increase incrementally. The sensible thing to do is to attack Authority whenever we can. Attacking is not distinct from communicating the reasons for our attacks, or building the means to survive, because we survive in order to attack, and we attack in order to live, and we communicate because communicating attacks the isolation, and isolation makes living impossible. Why do signals of disorder constitute attacks on capitalism and the State? After all, the police are basically the punching bag, the shock absorbers, for the State, and one of the limitations of the insurrection in Greece was that anarchists focused too much on police, rather than on the State in all its manifestations. And what about smashing insured bank windows? Creating a signal of disorder could even involve mere spraypainting, or hanging out on street corners. Isn't this just the ritualization of aimless and impotent rebellion, as the naysayers are so quick to say? Turns out, the devil is in the details. In a way, the idea of signals of disorder is an inversion of the Broken Windows Theory of policing. Wilson and Kelling's article, “Broken Windows,” first advanced the policing theory of the same name in 1982, but it wasn't until Kelling was hired by the NYC Transit Authority later in the decade that this flagship of minute social control was launched. When Rudolph Giuliani was elected mayor of New York in 1993, Broken Windows policing took on city-wide dimensions, and it soon spread to the rest of the country. By the early '00s, Broken Windows was being adapted for the social democracies of Europe. Among the technocrats, Broken Windows is controversial, because it easily blurs causation with correlation: just because broken windows and other signals of disorder often accompany higher crime rates does not mean they are the cause of crime. Occasionally, you'll hear a whimper that without proper sensitivity training, Broken Windows policing encourages harrassment of minorities. All this misses the point: the State is not interested in reducing crime, the State is interested in increasing social control, and Broken Windows policing is a critical expansion of its arsenal. Giuliani's reign of “zero tolerance” didn't just go after fare-dodgers, graffiti writers, and the squeegee men. Under his stewardship, the NYPD became the first ever police department in the history of the world to log more arrests than reported crimes. Entire neighborhoods became depopulated of certain demographics as young black men were shipped to the prisons upstate. A policing that targets the petty details of every day life, that criminalizes our minor strategies to cope with the impossibilities of life under capitalism, is part and parcel of an expansion of police power as a whole. Why does the city government in San Francisco want to criminalize sitting or lying in the streets? Why did the city government in Barcelona ban playing music in the streets without a license? Why did the government of the UK prohibit a detailed list of “anti-social behaviors”? Because the goal of the State is total social control. Because the trajectory of capitalism is towards the total commercialization of public space. Every time we identify another invasion of State and capitalism into the minutiae of daily life, every time we confront that invasion, we are potentially fighting for revolution. As Authority increasingly manages us at the nano level, the can of spraypaint, the rock, the molotov, deserve the same significance as the AK-47. Spreading signals of disorder accomplishes a number of things. It increases our tactical strength, as we hone a practice of vandalism, property destruction, public occupation, and rowdiness. It interrupts the narrative of social peace, and creates the indisputable fact of people opposed to the present system and fighting against it. It means the reason for this fight, the anarchist critiques, have to be taken more seriously because they already exist in the streets. In this way, the attacks create the struggle as a fact in a way that would otherwise only be possible in times of greater social upheaval and movement. To have this effect, the signals of disorder need to explicitly link themselves to a recognizable social practice, one that would otherwise be ignored or chopped up into disconnected eccentricities of lifestyle. People in the neighborhood must know that the graffiti and broken windows are the doing of “the anarchists” or some other group that has a public existence, because signals of disorder that can be isolated as phenomena of urban white noise can be legitimately and popularly policed with techniques reserved for inanimate objects and aesthetic aberrations; they would rub us off the streets with the same chemical rigor as they clean graffiti off the walls. Signals of disorder are contagious. They attract people who also want to be able to touch and alter their world rather than just passing through it. They are easy to replicate and at times, generally beyond our control or prediction, they spread far beyond our circles. They allow us, and anyone else, to reassert ourselves in public space, to reverse commercialization, to make neighborhoods that belong to us, to create the ground on which society will be reborn. In a neighborhood where the walls are covered with anarchist posters, beautiful radical graffiti stands alongside all the usual tags, advertisements never stay up for long, the windows of luxury cars, banks, and gentrifying apartments or restaurants are never safe, and people hang out drinking and talking on the street corners and in the parks, our ideas will be seriously discussed outside our own narrow circles, and the state would need a major counterinsurgency operation to have just the hope of uprooting us. Whenever we can break their little laws with impunity, we show that the State is weak. When advertising is defaced and public space is liberated, we show that capitalism is not absolute. But at the same time, we cannot make the mistake of exaggerating the importance of the attack, of signals of disorder. At times it may be necessary to be a gang, but if we are ever only a gang, if at any point only our antisocial side is visible, we are vulnerable to total repression. There is a lot of rage circulating, without an adequate outlet, which we resonate with through our attacks. But there is equally a lot of love that is even more lacking in possibilities for true expression. People desire the community and solidarity that capitalism deprives them of, and our way out of this laberinth of isolation is to go looking for the others and meet them where they're at. To encounter people, in our search for accomplices. Except in the magical space of the riot, we cannot safely find spontaneous accomplices for the attack. But in the stultifying oppression of everyday, we can find accomplices to share in the little gestures of defiance, the small tastes of the commune we are building—a random conversation, a flyer someone is actually interested to read, the passing around of a stolen meal, collaboration in a community garden, the giving of gifts. The anarchists must simultaneously be those who are blamed for acts of startling indecency, of inappropriate extremism in all the right causes (“they burned four police cars at our peaceful march!”) and those who are around town cooking and sharing free communal meals, holding street parties, projecting pirated movies on the sides of buildings, running libraries and bicycle repair shops, and appearing at protests (“oh look, it's those lovely anarchists again!”). We will be safest from the right hand of repression and the left hand of recuperation when everyone is thoroughly confused as to whether we are frightening or loveable. Add new comment Printer-friendly version ### Hot article! Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 01:27. Hot article! » reply ### OK, i dig this a lot, like Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 04:05. OK, i dig this a lot, like 100%. BUT. How different are 'Signals of Disorder' from 'Propaganda of the Deed,' other than that PotD always seems to connote bombings and assassinations for some reason? In other words, is SoD a more expansive phrase that means a lot of the same things as PotD? captcha: anguished bookshop » reply ### Exactly, this is sooo good Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 04:44. Exactly, this is sooo good it is bad, which is the magical space of the riot! Nice. » reply ### this is an awesome article. Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 07:11. this is an awesome article. frightening and lovable! » reply ### pretty delusional, but Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 10:56. pretty delusional, but pretty nonetheless. i really do wish that the heartbreak of this world would end with the death of the state and the collapse of capitalism, but you are identifying and obsessing over a couple of limbs on an even greater leviathan that even the most powerful urban social antagonist force is no match for, that any commune will eventually become integrated into without a total re-conceptualization of purpose. best of luck... captcha: gilligan eventually » reply ### I just want to draw Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 11:40. I just want to draw attention to the similarities between the concept of "Signals of Disorder" and what the Red & Anarchist Action Network has described as "Physical Presence". Compare also this quote: "To have this effect, the signals of disorder need to explicitly link themselves to a recognizable social practice, one that would otherwise be ignored or chopped up into disconnected eccentricities of lifestyle." (the above text) to this one: "...but as long as you are openly identifying your actions under the banner of RAAN, in such a way as for them to be unmistakable, they will instantly effect countless others around the world who consider themselves in affinity with the network, and at the same time all the accumulated credibility of RAAN’s past activity will be conferred onto you." (Emotional Poverty #5, RAAN publication) This essay is going to be lauded across the anarchist milieu - and any attempts to associate these ideas with RAANista ideology will of course be scoffed at as opportunism - but as we have said so many times before, this strategy will not take hold in the United States without a visible organization to absorb its momentum. » reply ### Are you suggesting that the Submitted by Comrade Meowlatesta on Mon, 2010-08-02 12:52. Are you suggesting that the organization for this is RAAN? » reply ### That is of course my Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 14:09. That is of course my personal preference, but the objective truth is that any "brand name" will do so long as the people behind it are sufficiently conscious of the psychological and social processes that they are trying to stimulate with their actions and dialogue. I do believe that a case can be made for RAAN as being the most advanced in terms of trying to strategize around these processes, even if one does not see it as the ideal banner from under which to agitate. » reply ### Does RAAN limit presence to Submitted by Squee on Mon, 2010-08-02 17:01. Does RAAN limit presence to disorderly presence? I think presence is a basic enough fundamental for propagandistic purposes, but disorderly presence here is being theorized as an explicit statement on the States ability to control us. This is a problematic theory because it presupposes that the message of disorder will connote well with the "right people" and that the disordering capacity of anarchists directs attention to constructive anarchist projects more than it obfuscates them. I simply do not think disorder, even if it inherently demonstrates a possible freedom from totality, is an explicit statement at all. The author writes: "To have this effect, the signals of disorder need to explicitly link themselves to a recognizable social practice, one that would otherwise be ignored or chopped up into disconnected eccentricities of lifestyle. People in the neighborhood must know that the graffiti and broken windows are the doing of “the anarchists” or some other group that has a public existence, because signals of disorder that can be isolated as phenomena of urban white noise can be legitimately and popularly policed with techniques reserved for inanimate objects and aesthetic aberrations; they would rub us off the streets with the same chemical rigor as they clean graffiti off the walls." But it's not a mere matter of linking disorder to anarchists and assuming this link will somehow encourage our repressed projects (constructive ones) will be taken heed to. The general pattern I notice is that even people with direct contact with anarchists (that are not anarchists) follow the "signals of disorder" to more of the same: they see broken windows and anarchist symbols/slogans and then look into what other disorderly activity anarchists are responsible for. So the signal of disorder links to more signals of disorder, and the composite image of anarchists is - the disorderers. Theorizing some balance of how disorderly and how constructive anarchist activity is as a solution to the problems of "being taken seriously" and "repression" is missing the main problem: how to demonstrate anarchist "solutions" to State and Capitalist problems are "good" and "serious". I think what needs to be said is there is a huge disproportion in how much disorder we become known for, and how many problems we solve. So anarchism appears as a great way to fuck things up to people that want to fuck things up, but rarely as a great way to well being and liberty for people who want well being and liberty. The more robust understanding I think is that anarchist disorder is best linked directly to the defense or promotion of anarchist projects related to what is being disordered. And, that those projects ought to be present and practicable first so instead of seeing a mere link between anarchists and a destabilization of social life as is, a direct relationship is created between how "bad" State and Capitalist control is to how "good" anarchist practices would be if adopted more widely. Example: FNB is repressed by police, so a grocery store is disordered and linked directly to FNB. Not the best example, but it is at least a picture. Or, FNB can be linked to the disorder of capitalist grocery stores without first beige repressed. Ultimately, I think people generally just feel disillusioned with radical change in society when they see those creating disorder instead of seeing a solution creating disorder. » reply ### Nah, in fact the idea of Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 17:14. Nah, in fact the idea of "physical presence" was first brought up as a call to create multiple print publications in the network's name so as to diffuse it more effectively. Cultural events and even photographs of events that can be directly used by other RAAN cells in the expansion of the group's imagery are also considered "physical presence". I think that disorder that is explicitly tied to an organization is capable of serving as a point of reference, but beyond that it is up to that organization to responsibly nurture the "buzz" those actions create. » reply ### "FNB is repressed by police, Submitted by anon on Tue, 2010-08-03 01:46. "FNB is repressed by police, so a grocery store is disordered and linked directly to FNB." This is a recipe for jail. » reply ### But if "anarchists" flash Submitted by Squee on Tue, 2010-08-03 12:17. But if "anarchists" flash loot a grocery store, it isn't? Are you saying it is a recipe for jail because it wouldn't be as anonymous, or because it is illegal? If the former, it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine anonymous actions linked to some anarchist project are about as inevitably repressed as those linked to anarchists as an identity (maybe not FNB, I said it was a bad example). If the latter, not every method of creating "disorder" is illegal. When I say disorder, I mean that in a very literal way. I realize that the legality of certain activities is in part a measure of how disorderly they are (disorderly conduct, especially). But, my point is really that if a solution in-itself creates a certain degree of disorder: FNB creates disorder by merely offering food for free, a workers union creates disorder, even solutions we have nothing to do with create 'disorder' ...for those who have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Microsoft and Apple created a lot of disorder by offering their solutions to IBM, and then Linux created even more disorder. The point isn't to emphasize some sort of specific kind of disorder, it is to emphasize that the way disorder is perceived may be heavily influenced by whether what causes disorder is at the same time offering a new order, or rather points to a philosophy people probably don't know a whole lot about and aren't going to go out of their way to understand. I would hazard that people are intellectually lazy, sensitive to aesthetic "signals of disorder", and have an interest in the signals of solution readily explicit. -Squee » reply ### This piece is so bizarre. At Submitted by anon on Mon, 2010-08-02 14:15. This piece is so bizarre. At the beginning it says the "sensible behavior is not to reason with the masses," but the rest of the piece is directed at making an emotional appeal toward the masses through avant-garde action. The implicit suggestion is that the masses are stupid. Moreover, the actions suggested don't get beyond reasoning with the masses; each action that shows the State is weak just a different way of going about it. When anarchists are blamed for acts of "starling indecency," this just makes the anarchist party one more political sect and denies the subjectivity of "the masses," which the authors of this piece seems to be attempting to incite. I guess the most questionable line of the essay is toward the beginning in suggesting that the people who rejected anarchist vandal tactics took them up later on because of anarchists. This is a pretty specious claim -- though it certainly requires some investigation and elaboration. There's no more evidence for the claim than the counterclaim that folks who already sympathized with anarchist tactics then took them up when they felt the time was right -- which is cool, but it's a whole different game to argue anarchist activity was responsible for wholly changing people's views. Rioting, etc, is not a uniquely anarchist activity and it's totally normal that these tactics are taken up in times of unrest. Only when broken windows communicate themselves -- and not 'anarchy was here' -- could we see them becoming a widespread liberatory practice. » reply ### The article does not Submitted by anon on Tue, 2010-08-03 10:07. The article does not implicitly suggest that the masses are stupid. It explicitly states that: "An interesting feature of these signals is that they will be met with fear and disapproval by the same people who may later participate in creating them. This is no surprise. In the news polls of democracy, the majority always cast their vote against the mob. In the day to day of normality, people have to betray themselves to survive. They have to follow those they disbelieve, and support what they cannot abide. From the safety of their couch they cheer for Bonny and Clyde, and on the roadside they say “Thank you, officer” to the policeman who writes them a speeding ticket. This well managed schizophrenia is the rational response to life under capitalism. The fact that our means of survival make living impossible necessitates a permanent cognitive dissonance." To be schizophrenic is not to be stupid, it is to inhabit an impossible psychological position. Furthermore, it's not a specious claim that non-anarchists knowingly took up anarchist tactics. This is one of the historical facts of the Greece rebellion (a book about which the article refers to at the very beginning, giving a specific historical context to this article) that even many Leftists admit to. » reply ## Comment viewing options Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.