Front Cover

THE DIVORCE GETS UGLY

SUN ZINE

Hemispere server by satellite 'A' Earth Beam link between satellites

SUN ZINE

FOR ALL THE WOMEN YOU ARE

Inside Front Cover

water sunlight air

..sunspot activity continues to peak. Experts say we're being cooked by solar storms which may be triggering massive changes in the way people live and think...

So fire a missle at the sun, for crying out loud. Crazy kinds on solar flares, next thing you know they're busting caps in...

Introduction

...life seems to express in a specific way the very conditions in which our biosphere is embedded, incorporating the nonlinearities of chemical reactions and the far-from equilibrium conditions imposed on the biosphere by solar radiation. – Prigogine and Stengers.

If the Sun were a million dollars, the earth would be three bucks. - Isaac Asimov.

At the start of Fine Whine #3, there's that line ‘this is not post-uni angst’ - well, this is post-uni angst. My brain got crippled by ‘unscrupulous "college scum"’, turned all my thoughts into footnote disasters - whatever, it wasn't so bad but when it's all over you have to figure out how to think again, which is maybe what this is?

In the encyclopedia it says, ‘by the radiation of its electromagnetic energy, the sun furnishes directly or indirectly all of the energy supporting life on earth, because all foods and fuels are derived ultimately from plants using the energy of sunlight’. That's not exactly true, or at least it’s misleading (i.e., nuclear power isn't derived from plants/photosynthesis, like coal and oil or whatever are; but without the energy of coal and oil and stuff, you couldn't produce the technology to make nuclear power – so I guess it depends how you interpret indirectly'), but basically that's the idea/obsession behind this zine. The sun, solar history, the history of how the sun gets converted into human institutions – the state, prisons, biology (both the scientific discipline and, like, actual bodies), language, sex, rats, underground movies, whatever..

A few people have asked if doing a zine about the sun makes me a hippy. No, I'm not a fucking hippy. Fuck you.

One last thing. I'm sure some of you will read this and think, oh, it wasn't really about the sun - like the sun was just some alibi for me to go off ranting about whatever I wanted. Nuh uh, baby. It's all about the sun. To steal a justification from a philosopher, it's like Bataille said: ‘To Break up the subject and re-establish it on a different basis is not to neglect the subject; so it is in a sacrifice, which takes liberties with the victim and even kills it, but cannot be said to neglect it.’

Heliopolis

‘In front of their parents’ former homes two teenage hoods held on to each other with affection. Then they let go.

‘The door to a squat opened. Dawn flowed in along the carpet and tiles of its entrance. A naked boy and a naked girl lay on the floor. The sun of blood and egg-yoke fascinated their almost dead eyes into waking.’

11 000 b.c., end of the last ice age: Society goes solar. The light of this new empire of the sun burns your eyes as you rub away the sleep; giving up hunting, you learn to cultivate edible plants and, soon after, to domesticate and breed animals for food. You're still sleepy, but nomadism already seems so long ago; suddenly you have a job, new kinds of laws, a family defined by the boundaries of your house and land, a king to worship and obey. By the time you've really woken up it's too late, the body of the earth is already cancerous with despotic power; civilisation has set it.

How did it happen? Throughout recorded history, ‘civilisation’ has been connected to the sun, but we still don't know why societies began delegating their authority and wealth to monarchs and bureaucracies. As Pierre Clastres writes, ‘primitive societies are societies without a State because for them the State is impossible. And yet all civilized peoples were first primitives: what made it so the State ceased to be impossible?’ For Clastres, it's a mistake to call ‘primitive’ societies ‘stateless’, or otherwise define them by what they supposedly lack; societies without markets, writing, history, etc. Such terms reveal more about modern biases than the conditions of life in primitive societies; we imagine that our own societies are the standard against which other forms can be measured (and found inferior). On the contrary; for Clastres, primitive' societies are defined not by any lack, but by the positive existence of a whole set of mechanisms for preventing the formation of a state. Clastres thus turns the state from a conclusion into a question: What force or forces overcome society's resistance to the state?

For many states the answer is clear - they formed out of necessity, out of armies raised to defend tribes and chiefdoms against the military advantages of other states, or like Australia and the US were created in a period when the state-form was completely entrenched. But this leaves the question of the handful of states which arose autonomously, without the influence or threat of other states to guide them. Cultural anthropologists call such states ‘pristine’, and history shows that across widely differing timescales, pristine states emerged ‘at least once, possibly many times, on each of the continents except Australia and North America’ (and, of course, unpopulated Antarctica). While we don’t know why pristine states emerge, we can identify a series of factors which regularly interacted in their origins. These factors are the co-ordinates — political and pragmatic — of solar politics. Pragmatically, it's a matter of agriculture; ‘since plants. Via photosynthesis, simply convert solar energy into sugars, cultivation increased the amount of solar energy that traversed human societies. When food production was further intensified, humanity crossed the bifurcation that gave rise to urban structures.’ Politically, the elites of these early cities shored աp centralised authority ‘by identifying the person of the king with the impersonal, above all implacable, order of the heavens’ in an ‘affiliation of kingship with the worship of the sun'. In fact, this over simplifies things, there simply was no clear distinction between ‘pragmatic' and ‘political’ developments in the exploitation of solar flow. Rather, ‘intensified food production and societal complexity stimulate each other, by autocatalysis.' That is, states emerge in a web formed by interacting forms of solar activity, the rhythms of interwoven intensifications propelling each other into more and more rapid and complex developments. As de Landa writes, ‘what matters is not agriculture per se, but the great increase in the flow of energy-matter through society, as well as the transformations in urban form that this intense flow makes possible.’ ‘Solar energy is the source of life's exuberant development.’

The earliest and in many ways prototypical states, the city-states of Mesopotamia, depended crucially on this interaction between solar sustenance and solar politics; what emerged, strangely enough, was urban planning. Neither the city nor the state were arbitrary or contingent forms, they were carefully planned, ‘the highly conscious creation' of the first professional priestly caste, which arose between 3700 and 3200 b.c. These priests derived their authority largely from their knowledge of astronomy and meteorology, crucial skills in agricultural economies. The king, in turn, was crucially dependent on this authority; a reliable organisation of knowledge, natural and supernatural was, as Mumford argues, essential to make the machine Work" – the machine, in this case, being the state – and this knowledge was incarnated in the priesthood, without whose aid the institution of divine Kingship could not have come into existence." If this has been the general rule of the state - Mumford suggests it finds its contemporary expression in the ‘specialized scientists, technical experts, garnes theorists and computers' which are only ‘supposedly less fallible than the entrail-diviners' - it took a specific form in the early City-states. These states were based on the idea that politics should reproduce astronomy; ‘the laws governing the movements of the heavenly spheres should in some mystical way be the same as those governing the life and thought of men on earth.’

Thus, the architecture of the city was developed to mirror the organisation of the galaxy. The king, identified with the sun, was at the

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun.

centre, and notice that the Mesopotamians thus showed they already understood what Europeans would take thousands of years to discover - that the Earth orbited the sun, and not vice versa. Around the King, the walled city was divided into quarters just as the calendar was divided into seasons, and with the same intention – to subordinate people's movements to the celestial power of the sun. ‘The cult of the Sun God gave the ultimate authority of cosmic fitness and rightness to every earthly manifestation of order, regularity, predictability, and - because of the sun's own position and influence – of centralized power.’ This was the heliopolis, the city of the sun.

'The State's political power, then, is only secondarily “power organized by one class to oppress another.” More materially, it is the polis, the police, In other words highway surveillance', the organisation of urban space. But as Jack Smith says, ‘when you have police, everything looks queer.’ As soon as the first cities emerge, so does a deviant counter-urbanism, a psychogeography of public sex, a "city" in reducible to the object of urban planning, ‘a "city" populated by the homeless, the prostitute, the injecting drug user, the queer, the person living with AIDS, the Lumpenproletariat.’ Forget the solar state, it’s ridiculous moral laws and prohibitions. ‘There is no difference between desire and the sun: sexuality is not psychological but cosmo-illogical.' Even in Mesopotamia, roads are for cruising; highway surveillance has always already gone AWOL, turned perverted: ‘at the time, it was rumoured that a certain pattern of engine revs was a signal between driver and cop that the man behind the wheel was available.' And you don't even want to know what they were getting up to in the toilets, ‘weird and naked, feathers and bones, tents sewn with crystal, black dogs, pigeon-blood'... When every body and flow belongs to the sun King, the cover of shadow is where regulation breaks down and new possibilities develop and erupt, defecting from the sun, reminding us what we are – in this case, producers and consumers of body fluids, solar flows.

Nevertheless, the Sun King begins his reign by rerouting every relation through his own body as the central point of the new state. The state apparatus corresponds, at this point, to what Marx called the phase of formal subsumption of capitalism. It's forged no mechanisms of its Own, relies on existing mechanisms of production. With the heliopolis, this means that existing agricultural practices are recoded; their direct seation between the earth and the people is Severed, and the Sun King puts himself in the middle. (For capital, ‘formal subsumption’ was the capitalists' appropriation of wealth from forms of labour that preceded modern industrial production – the factory was the first specifically capitalist workplace, and marked the beginning of the tendency towards ‘real subsumption’, in which capitalism would function entirely through Institutions of its own creation.)

But the formal subsumption of the sun is a limited phase in human evolution; solar despotism rapidly develops its own institutions and practices (irrigation, writing, etc.) ‘If the first step in the rule of the Sun God was the unification of power and authority in the person of the Divine King, the second was the displacement of the actual king, who was still a living person, by a bureaucratic-military organization.’ By the end of the middle ages, the real subsumption of the sun was complete. And again as for the real subsumption of labour under capitalism (which wouldn't be completed until our own time), this meant the sun vanished as a historical force. Of course, the sun still provided literally all the energy used by humans, but the seamlessness with which its energy was absorbed by the megamachine rendered it invisible (the same is true for the real subsumption of labour). We enter the solar factory, the despotic regime of the church. This would not change until the 16th century; and then not in the way most people think.

Sun Language Theory

In the early twentieth century, Turkey found that the strong Arabic and Persian influences on its elite language, Osmanlica, hampered communication, and therefore, trade, with its European neighbours. The language would have to be modernised, i.e., brought closer to other European languages, to facilitate economic expansion. In this respect, the nationalistic sentiment whipped up by the 1908 revolution and WWI was both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, this nationalism sought to secularise society and sever ties with Islam, providing a justification for removing Arabic elements in the language. On the other hand, nationalists are rarely willing to give up or alter their language, seeing it as an unchanging part of their mythic/moronic national community.

Turkish elites responded by developing the Sun Language Theory. According to this entirely imaginary doctrine, ‘Turkish was the mother of all languages, and hence the borrowing of foreign words could be justified on the grounds that those lexical items had once belonged to ancient Turkish.’ A beautiful idea, certainly a beautiful name – who doesn't want to speak the Sun Language? But then, in a way, we all already do. National groups routinely mythify their languages, most obviously by denouncing the influence of foreign vocabularies – for example, complaining about the ‘Americanisation’ of Australian English, or the way the internet promotes illiteracy (when in fact, it creates new communicative norms around which linguistic materials can accrue). What such complaints ignore is that all languages grow by absorbing new linguistic materials, both properly 'foreign' words and slang terms generated by native speakers. Whenever a language is in use, it's subject to just this sort of continuous variation, when a language has stopped changing, it's dead. This is precisely what happened to Latin; the imperial elites who used it kept such a tight rein on the language it couldn't evolve, and so every deviation and creolisation was a departure from, rather than an addition to, Latin itself. The languages derived from Latin - the romance languages, including Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese - emerged precisely because they could change to accommodate and absorb the communities which used them.

It wasn't until long after these languages developed that anybody even tried to treat them as stable systems or grammars. In 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first English dictionary, beginning a trend for the codification of ‘proper’ – that is, middle class – English. The dictionary didn't just record word use, it was an authoritarian tool for setting the limits on language, to the extent that ‘a Bill was thrown out of Parliament In 1880 simply because one of its words had not been recorded by Dr. Johnson.’ Thus, middle-class English – in fact, merely one segment in a continuum of dialects – began to steamroll other dialects by presenting itself as the only correct form of the language. ‘A few years after Dr. Johnson's dictionary was unleashed on the population of linguistic replicators, decreasing the intensity of their variation, a series of normative and prescriptive grammars began to be published with the aim of reducing the syntactic habits of London's upper classes to a set of codified principles.’ Once elite speech habits had been turned into a Set of static principles, ‘standard' English became a quasi-science, a set of rules, which could be imposed across class barriers through the emerging system of classroom discipline.

Thus, the model of the Sun Language Theory – a fictional unity of the national language used to further elite interests – was influential long before the theory was actually formulated. As Rammellzee says, ‘to my knowledge societies and disease culture symbols have violated universal symbolic laws and shortcircuited the electromagnetic code of the Roman letter symbols and others used to build a word, the definition of a word to build a society and then a government and a future educational process to complete universal transit system and manipulate (blood system).' Every language is a fictitious unity, a political ideal disguising ‘a throng of dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages. [...] There is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language in a political multiplicity.' But this isn't just true of language; every form of centralised power, every norm or standard, is an authoritarian fiction, the dream of unity encoding uncontrollable swarms, nomadic networks without name or sign. ‘"Power," insofar as it is permanent, repetitious, inert and self-reproducing, is simply the over-all effect that emerges from all these mobilities,' a statistical average turned into The Law.

But beyond social control, the imposition of linguistic norms has long had a military function. Rammellzee notes that ‘The Romans stole the alphabeta system from the Greeks through war.’ There are countless examples of the ways conquest and colonialism have reshaped national languages through the connection between language and militarism: Modern Spanish is based largely on Castilian because Castilian-speakers dominated the war against Islam in the 11th century. ‘Through the prestige won during the war, as well as the migration of Castilians to settle the reconquered territories, the cultural and territorial influence of Castilian grew at the expense of other Hispano-Romance dialects, most of which [...] eventually withered away.' About ten thousand French words entered the English language during the Norman occupation. And during the French Revolution, royalists argued that 'a fundamental misunderstanding of certain words (e.g., egalité, volonté) [...] had shaped the revolutionaries’ thought processes and distorted their perception of things.’

‘In the 17" Century the word grammar was used almost exclusively to talk about technology.’ Today, virtually the opposite is true; all our grammars are technological, language is an effect of machines. We learn to talk from tee vee, to write from textbooks, and films and the Internet corrupt what we’ve learned with sang and neo-dialect contagion. Moreover, the institutions in which we learn standard English – most obviously, the nuclear family and the school – are themselves technologies, synthetic forms, all of them betraying an original connection to militarisation, the military function of language itself, the dark side of sun Language Theory. ‘In medieval times, monks ornamented letters to hide their meanings from people’, developing the concept of the code, a system for separating words from their meanings.

But the code isn't the sole property of the military classes. Popular resistance to linguistic authority routinely invents and deploys codes, ciphers, watchwords to bypass surveillance, to exclude cops and collaborators why are ‘safe city’ cameras in Melbourne being used to catch graffiti artists? Because graf is a code the authorities can't break. and unbreakable codes represent the possibility of absolute resistance. Graffiti is an uncontrollable mass of dialects and symbol systems indecipherable from outside; its meanings and secrets are only for the initiated, a set of languages gliding over the heads of commuters and cops who don't know the codes. At its most basic level this is wildstyle, hypercomplex letter-environments twisting in on themselves, unreadable by the standards of the major language. But beyond that there are plateaus of initiation, a complex system of tribe, skill, prestige, rank – to be initiated is to be endlessly subjected to the question, can you read this, or more important, can you write it? Kaze 2 famously breaks out of wildstyle, right out of the space-time continuum: ‘Nobody else can get down with [my work] because it's too 5th-dimensional. I call it the 5th-dimensional step-parallel staircase, 'cause it's like Computer Style in a step-formulated way.’ But even in the restricted space-time of regular pieces and tags, there are territorial divisions and argots to separate the initiated, staggered layers of meaning so that understanding one level of symbolism may leave you blissfully ignorant of other, more important meanings. In Melbourne, for example, the crew name ‘ultra vespa’ tracks back through its initials – UV, an imperceptible kind of light – to ‘unseen vandals’, a hidden boast of criminality, and then on through other mutations. Secrecy is the better part of freedom.

It's the same sort of operation all of us, in our own ways, subject language to all the time - developing personal chains of association, in-jokes, pet phrases that have special significance for specific groups we're part of We pass messages in the shadows cast by the Sun Language, or hide in plain sight, finding blind spots. ‘This is symbolic wars using slang and ionics to understand the very outline structure that makes A through Z its mathematics and science for disease culture to understand the consequences of structure that have been disease culturally sabotaged and trickknowledged.’ Ultimately, language is less important than the adventures we can have with it, corrupting its military cynicism or cruising its indifference. ‘Look what I have to do in order to do in order to think of thoughts,’ complains Jack Smith. ‘I have to forget language. All I can do with no education, nothing, no advice, no common sense in my life, an insane mother I mean, no background, nothing, nothing, and I have to make art, but I know what under these conditions the one thing I had to find out was if I could think of a thought that had never been thought of before, then it could be in a language that was never read before. If you can think of something, the language will fall into place in the most fantastic way. But the thought is what’s going into it.’

Capitalism, Hatred of

This is respect for the sun – also not uh, negation of nature that is the basis of capitalistic so-called theater. – Jack Smith.

Jack Smith never smiled, Nick Zedd says, 'but he was constantly trying to get other people to laugh. He told me once, "In Europe, I danced with a penguin. I was paid an enormous amount of exotic currency and was treated as royalty. The penguin was inert and feeble and at the conclusion of our dance I inserted my finger in his rectum. I smelled my finger. It did stink." He would tell me stories like this in a sad whining voice and a completely straight face.'

By the time Zedd met him, Smith was almost unknown. The fame surrounding his banned early 60s queer masterpiece Flaming Creatures had dried up, largely due to Smith's resistance to fame; 'I was very fashionable,' he said, 'but I couldn't deal with it.' But his obscurity had as much to do with temperament as intention. On the one hand, his perfectionism and commitment to experimentation meant he would never finish another film; on the other he came to despise the bad faith of more or less anyone who could have advanced his career – in particular the underground film patron Johan Mekas. Smith came to consider it his mission in life to fight Mekas – who he called 'Uncle Fishook', 'Uncle Roachcrust' or 'Uncle Pawnshop' – and 'the idea of expectations from authority' he represented.

Devoting himself to the battle against political evils, especially as epitomised in rent, Smith spent the last decades of his life as an exceptionally brilliant but impoverished writer, actor, director, playwright, filmmaker, designer, photographer, philosopher, etc. Somebody – I forget who – said he was the last person who ever believed in starving for art. The only records of his solo performance What's Underground About Marshmallows? begin, ‘I have to live in squalor, (chewing noises) all day long playing hide and seek with odors. I want to be uncommercial film personified. That's the... oh wait... have to live in squalor all day long playing hide and seek with odors... no kidding folks. They love dead queers here.’ ‘I can be happy in this way,’ he explained.

Kathy Acker writes that of all the underground film legends she met as a teenager – Brakhage, Rice, Markopolos, etc. – the ‘most important’ was Jack Smith. ‘I remember, when I was fifteen, Jack Smith telling me that what he most wanted to do was to build a huge dome somewhere in North Africa. Whoever entered this dome would tell Jack his or her dreams and instantaneously Jack would make a movie of this dream or series of dreams. Movies would be shown twenty-four hours a day.’ Such utopian movie studios are a common theme in Smith's work – not just as an idea or fantasy, but as a serious political project. Thus he proposes a ‘Free Paradise of abandoned objects in the centre of the city near where the community movie sets would also be’ alongside ‘struggling to introduce a basic civil law course into public schools’ and ‘infants being given to the old in homes for the aged’ as appropriate subjects/projects for popular cinema. Elsewhere, he expands on the ‘Free Paradise of abandoned objects’ when asked if he could imagine another type of society. ‘I can think of billions of ways for the world to be completely different [...] Like in the middle of the city should be a repository of objects that people don't want anymore, which they would take to this giant junkyard [...] I think this center of unused objects and unwanted objects would become a centre of intellectual activity. Things would grow up around it.’ This junkyard or ‘free paradise’ was central both to Smith's artistic practice – ‘trash is the material of creators,’ he insisted – and his political vision.

This anticapitalist:trash nexus is anticipated/mapped out in the work of renegade marxist George Bataille. For Bataille, since the sun is forever giving us too much energy, human societies aren't defined by their ‘modes of production’ (which are just ways to temporarily encrust the solar flows) but by the ways they consume, destroy and waste solar superabundance. Capitalist economies divide this waste into boring, pathetic forms – ostentatious displays of wealth, the everyday monotony of middle class consumerism – and spectacular ones, most obviously war. What's stolen from the working class isn't its labour or wealth, but its waste. Bourgeois values of social hygiene, the clean and proper body, consistency, normality, and the hatred of whatever's considered ‘dirty’ (i.e., all kinds of minorities - women, nonwhite peoples, queers, etc.) are all based on this repression and denial of the value of waste. Capitalism hates its trash, and Smith and Bataille are in perfect agreement on this point. The only response, as Smith says, is to ‘glamorize your messes.’ Bataille, working in the discipline of political economy, puts it more formally and argues that we need ‘a radical change of attitude that would force man [sic] to accede to sovereignty (voluntary renunciation of usefulness and of the accumulation of riches; propagation of nonproductive expenditures).’ This would mean not just an economic change, or any kind of reformist ‘distributive justice’. Trash is radical change: impossible destitution=incomparable insurrection. To accept this would be absurd from the point of view of capitalist rationality, but it ‘would [also] be to turn on to moldiness, Glamorous Rapture, schizophrenic delight, hopeless naïveté, and glittering technicolored trash!’

Variations on the connected themes of glamour, trash and utopian filmmaking recur all the way from 63's Flaming Creatures, with its collapsing cinema orgy, to (and beyond) 81's What's Underground About Marshmallows?, where Smith describes a ‘socialistic movie studio [...] where the public may arrive in the morning with their lunch to uh… to pay to watch movies being filmed in the sunlight.’ The studio would be circular, with the casts and crews traveling around it throughout the day to follow the movements of the sun. ‘This is respect for the sun – also not uh, negation of nature that is the basis of capitalistic so-called theater.’

The specific ‘negation of nature’ on which Smith's innovative critique of capitalism turned was, as noted above, rent, or in Smith's vocabulary (always idiosyncratic, almost it's own dialect; Smithglish), landlordism. What do you mean exactly by landlordism?, Sylvère Lotringer asked him in a famous interview. ‘Fear ritual of lucky landlord paradise. That's what supports the government.’ Lotringer, remaining baffled, asks, You mean property? ‘The whole fantasy of how money is squeezed out of real estate. It supports the government; it supports everything. And it isn't even rational. [It's] as irrational as buying a pair of shoes and paying for them every month.’ Here, Smith's ideas clearly conflict with traditional Marxism. He's for private property: ‘Buying and selling is the most interesting thing in the world. It should be aesthetic and everything else. But capitalism is a perversion of this.’ Lotringer is too bogged down in postmodern post-marxism to understand Smith's position, and Smith is clearly somewhat annoyed to have to explain, as if to a child, ‘Well, you don't own your own property.’ We don't own anything; for Smith, we are the victims of the various ways we're forced to ‘rent’ what we supposedly own, the continually applied conditions and payments – whether what we pay is cash, obedience to authority, bureaucratic tribute of capitalistic sexuality, time, language, roachcrust, pasty cheerfulness.

Where marxism sees property as foundation and expression of relations of class exploitation, for Smith the problem is that there is no private property, only the ‘fantasy’ or ‘fear ritual’ which ‘supports the government’.” Noting uncritically that all government is kleptocracy, or rule through theft, the liberal historian Jared Diamond writes that ‘kleptocrats throughout the ages have resorted to a mix of four solutions’ to the problem of public hostility to their appropriation of wealth. Two of these are based on the state's monopoly on force (simple repression, or convincing people they must maintain orderly government to avoid chaos and violence), one on bribery (using part of the stolen wealth in popular ways). The last, of course, ‘is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy’. For Smith, this is precisely what rent is; the ideology justifying kleptocracy under which, in fact, we regularly pay the landlords to steal from us. The belief that we can or do own anything is the ideology which hides our dependence on the only real owners – the government or landlord class.

---

To put it more academically, Smith preserves the critique of private property while inverting its ontological status. I know that is a stupidly complicated way to say it, but ‘ontological status’ is one of my favourite phrases and l couldn't resist.

Lotringer continues trying to understand Smith's ideas: You mean that everyone should own what they use? But for Smith, such an idea is just landlordist reformism, and so the increasingly confused Lotringer tries again. But if no one had to own anything... if you just use something, you don't have to pay for it, but it doesn't belong to you. It's the only time in the interview Lotringer stutters, as marked by the ellipses (which endlessly punctuate Smith's own comments), and he clearly finds the idea baffling. But to Smith, this is all quite self-evident, and he merely asks, ‘What's so incredible about that?’ before drifting off on one of the interview's many tangents (concerning, incidentally, sunlight and architecture).

But of course, it does seem incredible; to most people, then and now, Smith's politics were confused and absurd, a joke. He could surely have identified with Bataille when the latter wrote that his Accursed Share was a work that ‘no one awaits, that answers no formulated question, that the author would not have written if he had followed its lesson to the letter – such is finally the oddity that today I offer the reader. This invites distrust at the outset, and yet, what if it were better not to meet any expectation and to offer precisely that which repels, that which people deliberately avoid, for lack of strength: that violent movement, sudden and shocking, which jostles the mind, taking away its tranquillity; a kind of bold reversal that substitutes a dynamism, in harmony with the world, for the stagnation of isolated ideas?’

Years earlier, Smith had described landlordism as ‘magic, like paying sacrifices to the gods for protection to be left alone to do whatever it is you want to do’. If he never explains landlordism in more formal terms, it's not because his ideas are unclear but because the structure of the ideas rule out clear explanations; all existing language is landlordist. ‘Look what I have to do in order to think of thoughts,’ Smith complains, ‘I have to forget language.’ Landlordism is a situation of it being impossible to think outside of metaphors based on ownership and rent – metaphors based in and confirming our subservience to the state, while concealing the constraining violence of our failure to own anything (poverty and police action both fall under this heading). And all our thought and language is based on such metaphors. Smith dedicated the decades of his life following the Flaming Creatures scandal to escaping this situation, to trying to get people to understand and fight landlordism, but such a struggle could only appear absurd to those who didn't share his understanding of landlord power. ‘If anybody that can only comprehend capitalism would look at my behaviour [...] the only conclusion they could come to was that I was trying to destroy myself.’

When capitalism is in fact trying to destroy you?, Lotringer asks, but Smith is dismissive and barely seems to notice the interjection. To Smith, capitalism ‘tries' nothing because it's a relation rather than a system, a relation of theft which amounts to the landlordist corruption of ‘buying and selling’. Indeed, contrary to what's commonly thought capitalism isn't a market system, but a system of anti-markets, the various means (primarily monopolies and oligopolies) by which the powerful seek to avoid the supply and demand' mechanics which set prices in actual markets. Thus the historian Braudel writes, ‘I needed a special word to describe this zone which is not the true market economy, but indeed often its exact opposite. And the word that irresistibly suggested itself was precisely capitalism.’ This despite the misunderstandings of capitalism as industrialism. But what Braudel calls capitalism (landlordism) existed long before the 19" century origins it's usually assigned. It was well-established on the stock markets, in banking, property, in tertiary sector speculation generally before then. ‘Capitalism did not invade production until the industrial revolution [... and] even in the industrial era, [capitalism] was not exclusively attached to the world of industrial production, far from it.’ Rather, as Deleuze and Guattari say, ‘after a fashion, capitalism has been a spectre haunting every form of society’. This was certainly the case from at least the fifteenth century, when emerging forms of ‘real capitalism [...] already seemed diabolical to common mortals’.

It certainly seemed diabolical to Smith. ‘It gives me the horrors. Uncle Fishook represents the idea of expectations from authority, which is also perfect for me since I could spent the rest of my life demolishing very happily. I can be happy this way. You couldn't, but it has just been my lot in life to clean out the toilets. I mean that's the job that's been inherited by me in life and I have run away from it. I spent the last fifteen years running away from it. Nobody wants to open a can of worms, but that's the thing that has been handed for me to do. And maybe that's a part of all the bigtime manufacturers and capitalists, that they're Uncle Fishook. Maybe I've found a key to them in some way from having to deal with the evil that's come into my life.’