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“Well, the Gothic can be conducive to suppressed voices emerging, like in a haunted house. At its core, the Gothic drama is fundamentally about voiceless things—the dead, the past, the marginalized—gaining voices that cannot be ignored.”

— Carmen Maria Machado, interviewed by Theodore McCombs for Electric Literature (x)

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Peter A. Levine, In An Unspoken Voice

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Edward Said

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For Foucault, the only possible answer is a seemingly improbable one: ‘‘the adversaries do not belong to a common space’’; rather, the ‘‘place of confrontation’’ can only be quite literally a kind of nowhere or ‘‘non-place.’’

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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If any two communities do not share any assumptions, then by definition, a speaker located in one community cannot have any warrant for making an argument in the context of the other community. How would this kind of epistemological and moral incommensurability be handled in practice, if there can be no argument accepted as rational across such a gap, and therefore no negotiation?

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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[S]ince interpretation is not merely private, subjective belief, but is always a public exercise in persuasion, in practice, I will always have to formulate my interpretation in terms that will be both understandable and effective in my interpretive community, using its shared codes, procedures, and conventions as to what can count as evidence and how. While nothing objective underpins this interpretive community—the rules of its language-game are quite arbitrary, and different communities will play different interpretive games—the fact of community guarantees that there will be no interpretive free-for-all. Thus, even though texts do not and cannot inform our interpretations of them, we find in practice that our interpretations of a text will still tend to converge, because we share an interpretive community.

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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[F]or Stanley Fish and Roland Barthes, the interpreter who claims to be con- strained by a preexisting meaning within the text is either submitting, in fetishistic fashion, to an imaginary authority or is surreptitiously arrogating authority for himself or herself—an authority disguising itself as submission to the text. [...] Rorty, Fish, and Barthes offer an alternative account of interpretation that combines a refusal of the text’s political authority over us with a denial that interpretations can have any epistemic authority. The epistemic claim, here, underwrites the political claim. On the terms of this instrumentalist account of interpretation, texts have no fixed or preexisting identity, i.e., no essence, hence no intrinsic meaning; interpretation is simply the interpreter’s ‘‘appropriation’’ and use of a text to produce meanings. [...] Thus, as Barthes remarks, whenever an interpreter attributes the meaning he or she claims to find in a text to ‘‘the Author’’ (or to an author-surrogate, e.g., ‘‘society,’’ ‘‘history,’’ ‘‘psyche,’’ etc.), this is also an arrogation of authority to the interpreter.

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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Indeed, as an ethics of interpretation, antirepresentationalism appears to open itself to unethical potentials in more than one way. Either the encounter with the text is theorized in terms of a tautological process that merely reaffirms certain readerly presuppositions, or it is conceived as a kind of abject surrender of the reader to the text, the abandonment of critique.

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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Translated into practical terms, they specify practices of ‘‘interpretive disclosure,’’ of unmasking or penetrating surfaces, which determine in advance what will be discovered there, ‘‘behind things’’: namely, ‘‘the secret that they have no essence.’’

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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The ethical imperative that emerges from this articulation of the general critique of representation—the imperative not to represent the other—is, in this sense, deeply Kantian, in that it evokes a respect, even a sublime awe, for the noumenal unknowability of the other, calling on us not to reduce the other to an object of knowledge or utility, a means to an end, something to be categorized and controlled.

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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An anarchist hermeneutics, then, would seem to be a contradiction in terms—for what is interpretation if not the construction of representations of the text? Presumably, then, a consistent antiauthoritarianism would imply resistance to the representational premises of the hermeneutic enterprise, a refusal to interpret the text as signifying something beyond itself, hermeneutically substituting for the text an interpretation that says what it is.

Jesse Cohn, Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation

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Becoming monstrous is [...] the goal of dismantling the milieu as anarchist identity machine. Being witness to the nameless thing, to the unthinkable life or Planet or Cosmos, is not a goal. It is not a criterion of anything, either. It is more like a state, a mystical, poetic state (though in this state I am the poem).

Alejandro de Acosta, The Impossible, Patience

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It is probable that anarchy has always had something to do with becoming monstrous. The monster, writes Thacker in another of his books, is unlawful life, or what cannot be controlled. It seems to me the only way to do this, as opposed to saying one is doing it and being satisfied with that, would be to unflinchingly contemplate the thing we are without trying to be, the thing we can never try to be or claim we are: the nameless thing, or unthinkable life. Which is also the solitary thing, or the lonely one. The egoist or individualist positions are like dull echoes of the inexpressible sentiment that I might be that nameless thing, translated into a common parlance for the benefit of a (resistant, yes) relation to the social mass.

Alejandro de Acosta, The Impossible, Patience

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If the world as human World is the world-for-us, and the Earth as natural world is a world-for-itself, the Planet is the world-without-us.

Alejandro de Acosta, The Impossible, Patience

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The places, people, and events in past time that we enjoy or claim, appreciate or appropriate, must be creatively reidentified as non-historical, extra-historical, or anti-historical currents. There may have been, may continue to be what Foucault called insurrections of subjugated knowledges: counter-histories. It is true that certain moments of revolt are coupled with strange perspectives on history. But it is also true that these counter-histories have an odd way of becoming ordinary histories, either by incorporation into universal His-Story, its narrative, or by becoming the local his-stories of smaller groups and communities. As the latter they may have a temporary or even long-lasting protective effect for those groups or communities, but they weigh in the same way as His-story on those who purposely or accidentally put in their lot with them.

Alejandro de Acosta, The Impossible, Patience

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[D]étournement is a way to refuse to produce new decomposing art, provisionally turning decomposition against itself by rearranging existing elements[...]

Alejandro de Acosta, The Impossible, Patience

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Decomposition can be provisionally interpreted as the invocation of an ethico-political ideal against an aesthetic one, the refusal of the new in art, or even the refusal of art as such, insofar as, in its separated existence, it cannot act on the economy, cannot alter material conditions. But it can also be seen as a way of beginning to understand the “delay” from within the “delay”; and in that sense already suggests the refusal of the production of the new in every sphere when we are aware that it is empty repetition.

Alejandro de Acosta, The Impossible, Patience