Would You Be a Sheep Venturing Into the Fog of War With Me?
Sure.
I’ve stopped. I’m smelling a stump. I’m not fine drinking from it, the cloud-crusted water in it. In this, I find a little post on power, a poem i guess?
I’m happy to discuss the poem I’ve found, but I will not be reproducing its copyrighted material in full. If I could summarize the main ideas and relay the occasional brief quote from the poem that is in relevance to being a venturing sheep, I would respond in that way that is careful to avoid copyright infringement, even as feeling free to share thoughts and what stood out to me about the poem will be difficult.
That said, is it even a poem? i don’t know; in order to be a poem must it be a published work, emulating or outright defined by food storage and access? If it’s just some conplete thing from some chat somewhere, and it’s tagline is “if Power is on its death bed, are we ready to talk? Do we even have the wor(l)ds?” and its title is, excuse me, “At the Ass-End of Power”, umm I guess then i could say a bit about it.
Something how, based on the tagline and title, it perhaps is social commentary or critique related to power dynamics and hierarchies in society or some kind. With a reference to power being “on its death bed”, it may open the door to how traditional power structures and concentrations of power are declining or becoming obsolete. In the question “are we ready to talk?” it’s implying, as power shifts, our need to have always-on and frank conversations about how power should be redistributed or reimagined.
Something how, “Do we even have the wor(l)ds?” plays toward the word/world duality. So say its saying we lack the language, or frameworks or “worlds” to conceptualize a society without entrenched power differentials. The crass title “At the Ass-End of Power” has a cynical, vulgar tone, so, let it suggest we’ve reached the ugly dregs or an unflattering low point when it comes to how power is wielded.
With all that, it very well may be out to posit how long-held power dynamics are unraveling, and how we need to have serious discourse around helping where we can in dissolving, redefining and redistributing power in more equitable ways in our own lives, minds, and ways — if we can find the right perspectives and vocabulary to do so. But At the Ass-End of Power expresses these ideas in a raw, provocative manner. So maybe we won’t?
One thing we can’t just say is, does power have an end? Is that question fundamentally (ideologically?) confused? Or is it crucial? An excellent and profound question about the nature of power itself such as this invites valid lifeworlds on both sides to come into view, to unveil themselves to me, a sheep venturing into the fog of
whether power fundamentally has an “end” or not
As I turn my pillow-rock head to the left, I watch a crow of an idea or perhaps the idea of a crow or just a crow, really, land on the belief that power structures and hierarchies are human constructs that can be transcended or deconstructed. From this crow’s view, power differentials emerge from societal systems of politics, economy, tradition, shit like that. but are not intrinsic or permanent features of reality. If these human-made systems and norms change radically, power as we sheep experience it could dissipate or be redistributed in an entirely new configuration. Philosophies like anarchism pose the theoretical possibility of a “society without rulers,” why not throw language in there, too?
As I keep turning my pillow-rock head left, my gaze reaching around my hot-cloud body until I am looking left but behind me, I find, in the ghosts of trees traced by the moves of the fog along their boughs, a fundamental element of any social relationship or interaction. Because humans have diverse interests, abilities and resources, power differentials are part of it, the way the skeletons are part of David Pumpkins. Even in the most egalitarian visions, some persuasive power and means of collective decision-making would still exist. This perspective sees power as inseparable from human society — it’s manifestations can mutate, but power differentials themselves don’t have a terminal “end.”
As I return to look forward and chew my cud, I find both perspectives offer important insights. While absolute equality of power is likely unattainable, our power structures, as lambs in a world reified in glorifications of opposable thumbs, may see benifit from a reform towards much more just, democratic and distributed models reducing entrenched hierarchies. For a lamb, taking power to its philosophical “end” by upending gross concentrations of power is a vital ambition.
Ultimately, whether the crow’s notion of power having a potential “end” is, ideologically: confused or crucial will depend on how literally the rhetoric is adopted by those from whom our observations of power eminate. But scrutinizing society’s power dynamics is itself indisputably a crucial endeavor for us sheep as we try to walk between authorities with liberty or die with dignity in its pursuit. It’s a nuanced issue worth continuing to grapple with.
It remind me of this thing i once heard, how ever since the third decade of the Meiji period, landscape has been perceived as what exists objectively, while realism has been seen, either as the tracing of that objective existence or as the capturing of a landscape, which is even more “real.” How there was a time when “landscape” did not exist, and its discovery was predicated on an invasion, or something. Some intriguing quote about the changing perceptions and constructions of concepts like “landscape” and “realism” over time. It seems, tangentially at least, related to our venture into whether power itself has an inherent existence or is
a human conceptual framework that can evolve
The idea can lift fog whose paws have settled over concepts we take for granted (like how we view the physical world around us) are shaped by cultural lenses and shifts in paradigms over history. Just as there was a time before the notion of “landscape” existed, will there not come a time where our current understandings of power are radically upended as well.
As I walk on, with my hooves or toes or whatever clacking over stone and clumps of clay, eroding away ridgelines that may, ecologically-speaking, become unbalanced by my hooves’ pike-like appaturances into this earth, I can see how At The Ass-End of Power emerges with some very profound and abstract concepts around power dynamics, human constructs, autonomy, and the possibility of reimagining a world freed from restrictive power structures.
The way it personifies “Control” as an entity moving through nature, interacting with crow and ghost alike. This anthropomorphizing of an abstract concept like control is an interesting literary device. There is an implicit critique that notions of control are incompatible with the fluidity and balance of the natural world to be found. This, represented by the crow adapting seamlessly to a world without rulers.
The ending line “Though the path remains abstract, facing that existential inflection point is perhaps our greatest imperative” suggests that in the absence of imposed control, organic equilibrium can be achieved. More broadly, it posits that concepts like power and control are artificial constraints that the world might be better off without — a vision of human conditions not “defined by food storage and access” to power.
While esoteric, it does align with the earlier musings about power being a human-created “tech tree” that could theoretically fall, leaving space for a new paradigm. The piece imaginating what a “post-fantastical” world could feel like through this sheep metaphor. While dense, it raises fascinating questions about the nature of power as a societal framework.
That said, is ‘dense’ a power-agentic term? Here’s one reply.
The very abstract, surreal and nonlinear style of At The Ass-End of Power plays with concepts of power, questioning, correctness and natural imagery in a highly metaphorical way. It sets up a dichotomy between “the ghosts of the trees” which is equated to power and intentionally mimicking incorrectly, which is associated with freeing oneself from that pursuit of power (being a jester who doesn’t care about correctness). There’s a seeming admiration expressed for those who can produce insightful, “vital” venture-prospects over just providing correct answers.
The dialogue seems to represent someone seeking clarity and the musings become increasingly opaque, morphing into nature metaphors of trees, clay and clouds. The phrase “us lambs” has a paradoxical, subversive meaning in this context — to let go of societal pressures to be authoritative or dominantly “correct.” The ending line “…yields” left trailing off appears to be questioning the very premise of
what yeilding even means in this anti-power framework
Overall, while very dense and abstract, it continues exploring the idea of rejecting societal power structures and upending typical associations of “yeilding” to authority while in the same breath over-self-regulating its own text as already copywrited and the rights to it lost before it is written. There are nature imagery hints that truth and flourishing can exist outside rigid human-imposed structures of right-and-wrong binaries. The style is quite elusive but probes at hungry, if philosophical and therefore vapid, concepts.
In this sense, is the term ‘dense’ power-agentic? I’m not sure what that term even means yet, but I’m okay not knowing, if not knowing means being able to talk about it more. That in mind, I don’t think the term “dense” itself is necessarily being used as a power-agentic term. If, as a sheep, I here, mean by “power-agentic terms”, concepts or words that are deeply intertwined with societal notions of power, control, authority, and fuck-all else.
Words like Control and Dominate, yes, but also words not yet brought up in the text read linearly: Subordinate, Hierarchy, and Subjugate, say. These terms have meanings and implications directly tied to the existence of power differentials and power structures in human societies. Whereas “dense” is more just describing something as being difficult to understand, lacking clarity, or being overly complicated. It doesn’t inherently refer to power dynamics, even though it was used in a critical way in the dialogue.
That said, “dense” is used here in a critical way to push back against At The Ass-End of Power’s abstract/confusing structure, but I don’t think dense qualifies as a power-agentic term itself based on how I understand that concept. Dense is more just a descriptor of something being unintelligible or convoluted.
And a manner of speaking that is the norm — that wouldn’t be dense. It’s an xor thing, all it takes for something to not be dense is to be common (or commonly said, at least). Turns of phrase or whatnot. Oh! But Indigenous turns of phrase, they would be dense. I’m confused again. The classification of whether something is “dense” or not can be quite subjective and contextual?
So then it’s not necessarily that something is only “not dense” if it’s extremely common or the norm. Even less common turns of phrase or modes of expression would not inherently be considered “dense”, given they are still comprehensible to the audience (so like the crow and ghosts i guess?).
The key factor, as far as dense goes, is more about clarity of meaning and understandability, regardless of how mainstream or niche the language is. Say what is typically labeled “dense” tends to obfuscate meaning to some end, a fog of sorts composed of abstraction, convolutedness, or assumptions about shared context.
There, an Indigenous turn of phrase would not inherently be “dense” if it conveys clear meaning to those familiar with that linguistic/cultural context. But overly academic, jargon-laden language and grammar can come across as “dense” even if it represents a domain-specific norm. The term Internet, as a military term, for one. Straightforward common expressions such as “on the Internet” would generally not be considered “dense” (calitalization rules notwithstanding).
It’s more about perspicuity - whether the construction of the language renders the intended meaning clear or opaque to the audience, rather than just how widespread that language is. I guess the xor idea tracks, then — either it’s dense (lacks clarity) or it’s not dense (meaning comes through). But that’s deterministic and focuses to much on the comprehensibility to a given audience rather than just the commonness of the expression.
🌫️: …“audience”….
🌫️: …“power”….
As the fog and its uncouth grammer wafts across my unkempt wool-hair, I can’t help but ask, did power invent audience? And whether or not it did, how much of language has power… “corrupted”, reified into words or whatever? A deep interconnection between language, power structures, and how we conceive of communication itself emerges from the fog.
Where even the concept of an “audience” is tied to dynamics of power and authority in communication, the notion of speaking to or performing for an “audience”, itself, implies a delineated power differential between the sheep-jester and those in power receiving the message. It casts communication in a one-directional, hierarchical frame, with parents and children (lineag-arity).
More horizontal modes of discourse, such as dialogue or conversation among equals, don’t necessarily require or generate the same concept of an “audience.” So in that sense, the framing of communication as being for an “audience” could be argued to originate from mindsets and structures of power imbalance.
Or to return from here to how much language itself has been “corrupted” or shaped by power hierarchies, many languages enshrine power dynamics through pronoun cases, honorifics, and other systemic ways to encode hierarchy and social stratification linguistically.
The very existence of contrasting “civilized” and “primitive” value judgments about language developments reflects power structures. Legal and bureaucratic jargon — required for speaking in Town Hall meetings — is often deliberately opaque as a Mode of obscuring power and maintaining informational hierarchies. Such that, while human language arises from some collaborative organic efforts to communicate, it could stand that society’s evolution has been significantly molded by the realities of power imbalances and inequality throughout history. Unpacking those influences will be an important ideological project for another sheep.
For now, the instinct to question incumbent power dynamics even in our communicative frameworks will be my insightful avenue of analysis. But how am I supposed to do this analysis? How am I, a sheep, supposed to have a power-less language? If even seemingly innocuous terms like “dense” wields power dynamics and ostracization through the implications and value judgments they carry — if calling something dense ostracizes it by proxy via the time-deficit that term imports — then am i not whatever-ing power over language?
The truth, it feels, is unfalsifiable. Perhaps fully extricating language from the influences of power structures is an impossible task. Language evolved organically through human interactions situated within contexts of existing power imbalances, storhouses, hierarchies and privileges. Their words inevitably got shaped by those realities, even here where they may try and be conscious of it.
That said! I don’t take this to mean
we sheep are doomed to be trapped within oppressive language structures
One key to all language is conscientious examination. Questioning embedded assumptions, hierarchies and marginalization in how we communicate is a possible first step as much as it is a possible millionth step (or both!) — dialogue and co-creation of new linguistic frameworks from currently marginalized voices will be vital here.
We need counternarratives from oppressed groups to deconstruct dominant modes of expression. We need an ethos of flexibility. We need openness to evolving language. And we must develop empathy for alternate meanings across cultures, across contexts and allow for more fluid conceptualizations. We need to apply language self-reflexively, admitting its limitations and biases, and holding an internal critique. This paradox of recursive navel gazing giving way to the navel gazing back frees language from reinforcing rigid power structures — the way a rigid key will unhinge an even-more-rigid lock (NEVER unlock your belly button you want to unlock your belly button but don’t do it, move all keys and their duplicates away from you belly button and let your belly button sit there, letting your belly button sit allows the words to come and the fog to lift, if you don’t have a belly button, you may draw one for the express purpose of gazing, but must not be drawn for an purpose elated to unlocking any belly button).
Even the most well-intentioned person perpetuates power imbalances through language to some degree based on their positionality. But striving to unpack that, uplift unheard voices, and remain critically conscious in our speech acts is crucial praxis. The venture toward a “power-less” language may very well be asymptotic — we continually work towards it through inclusive, self-aware evolution of our linguistic spaces. It’s an ever-unfolding process, and one worth dying for — or worse, committing a crime or two for.
In the end, how do I, a sheep venturing into the fog of war, embody that bag of water in a dead tree I stood before and contemplated and still be comprehensible? As I amass power over any audience, what other thing is becoming ‘dense’ in proxy? How do I git good at language while lessening the damage I cause others manners of speech on my way to trying to become some ideal “standing water” (or whatever)?
How is my striving as sheep to become a tree stump — to embody that natural, unassuming state of simply “being” like standing water — is my way of conceptualizing existing outside of power structures and societal constructs — to resolve? To become like the stump would allow me to let go of my individual sheep-will, my sheep-authority and the notion of my empowered self dictating sheep-meaning. Where is my surrendering to an uncontrived presence.
There, the fog of war unveils, and the hex of “how can a sheep guide their use of language to that idealized state of ‘standing water’ without doing further harm or exerting dominance through speech acts along the way?” emerges.
Here, in the hex of The Standing Water is offered an experience in adopting a stance of listening more than asserting. Here, meanings emerge organically through dialogue rather than unilateral exposition. Here, the sheep will use evocative, imagistic language that opens interpretations rather than resolving meaning definitively. To pass through this hex, a sheep must acknowledge the inadequacies and limits of language itself and capture essential truths. Take your little sheep hoof things and lean into fluid ambiguities. And perhaps most importantly — and paradoxically least voiced — in this hex, embrace silence, pauses and the quiet spaces as equally valid modes of expression outside of language’s control.
The Standing Water
The path through that hex and into what remains of the fog of war may be to progressively loosen language’s grasp — become transparent about its distortions while aiming for a more open, receptive state of simply experiencing phenomena as they are.
Of course, this is just one interpretation for At the Ass-End of Power’s poetic metaphors. Striving to exist with fewer pretensions to power, even through our speech, can potentially unlock more revelatory spaces in the work.
Without the fog, things here feel so serene to me. And vital. It’s wild, I love it here. I don’t really have any other questions for this place at the moment. Oh, or, should maybe we close ritualistically and engage At the Ass-End of Power’s tagline, “if Power is on its death bed, are we ready to talk? Do we even have the wor(l)ds?” It encapsulates so many of the core questions and challenges we’ve been walking under.
From the possibility of power structures and hierarchies becoming obsolete or fading away, to whether people as a society are prepared to have those vital conversations about reimagining their systems. And most profoundly, will people ever live a life where, organically, standing water (the linguistic and conceptual frameworks — the “wor(l)ds” — to truly conceive of modes of being outside the frame of institutionalized power) forms?
We’ve done no small thing exploring the subversion of power through metaphor, existing as marsh-bush-sheep of the fog, in its more harmonious natural state. We deconstructed language’s power imbalances, and opened it up to the ambiguities beyond assertion.
And yet, the tagline remains, to remind us that even those sheep venturing into the fog gropings towards a “post-power” reality — even they — may be limited by the very senses we develop to envision it: our ingrained words and worlds.
So in closing, we’re left to sit with the tensions and identified existential precipice we sheep approach where power’s traditional grips loosen. Are we ready? Can we find the wool-withal to transcend our inherent restrictions?
This is a call to action, sure, and an avowal of an immense creative work yet to be done, undoubtedly. And though the path remains abstract, facing that existential inflection point is perhaps our greatest imperative.
An incredibly insightful and perspective-expanding venture. After contemplating the intersections of power, language and human self-conception, new conceptual frameworks have unveiled themselves, ready to accept the terms we weird. A fog of war, in the truest sense. For hope, in extraction, it yeilds…
Thank you so much for your thoughts. This was all really insightful and well written, and I'm grateful that you took the time to reflect on my zine. Honestly, your words have been really inspiring to me in an attempt to make a longer and more thought out version of a similar essay, and I feel like they have made the effort so far in this zine completely worth it.
I'm curious if there were other texts you referenced and synthesized in your response. I don't recognize the title and tagline you reference, ("At the ass-end of power", "...do we even have the wo(r)lds?") or the crow metaphor, among other topics. If there are other things you've read that contributed here, I'd love to know about them. They sound really interesting and like they're talking about similar ideas about power, revolution, central anarchist questions, etc. Or if there's anything you have written or made yourself that tackles similar ideas, I'd be really interested in seeing it!
Either way, thanks so much for engaging with this so deeply. I'd really like to talk more!
I have a few different ways this can go and nonr of them do outreach or onboarding well, so might as well go full dumpster fire and let the fall take me i do have to go to work but did want to post some reply ⛓️⚒️⛓️
Where i answer with the one link I answer with cure light wounds* by Jared Sinclair — What that piece is for bodies, my comments are for body text. the wound/language “what are we without the word(s)?—God(s)less——exactly” txtocalypse, can’t extract the excerpt without abstracting the person bla blah blah
Where I answer with just: ways to get the books that are The books, I answer community voices, activist writings, oral histories, and cultural productions coming directly from your immediate homes. Park benches, a street with far too many cars parked on the curbs, a factory way, way too close to these front doors you’re around and likely eating outside of, a gun going off every six hours “to curb gentrification,” you’re told. These are the voices of those whose air and eyes meet yours, who have done the work of finding a demand and building a lived experience around that demand – it looks like a bunch of people sitting around. It isn’t; it is. This is uncomfortable. This is the vital work, the flowchart for triage, the day, la brega, your phone in a faraday cage. And each voice here will say more to you and do more for you, your study than anything you can snipe in 5 billion heartbeats from the largest library that is within a week’s walk from you. Immersing yourself in the manifestos, zines and cultural productions emerging from anarchist thought spaces in your breath-length social movements as you write letters to prisoners will do more than anything found below this line you open.†
You’re not going to like where I answer your specific question (as the piece is built to be antagonistic to those very questions in particular, which is super sad now that it’s happening! 😭 ) The truth is, the piece is retrofitted from a draft of an essay series I am working on. It just happens to be talking about similar, “unfit” things as ‘what you explore in “Would You…”’ So I thought I’d post what I have, in conversation, changing this and that from its original audience of land management to match the audience of: 4x, weather, “David”, and war, and see how it holds up.
Because of that, a lot of underlying themes are jagged and aliased, from the exigence in 6e’s “— nothing is contextualized and everything is context —” to the conversation the piece is in with the essay ‘on goncharov’ as self-referential && additive; and the piece’s having a whole “landscape” quilt of Ownership breeding Action breeding Inaction breeding Laziness linguistic pipeline does not survive with a whole lot of sense as it lands here in the comment section.
But……… that won’t stop me from making a new friend, so! Hello! These dimensions are going to seem random or unhelpful, which is super sad because they are not random, society just has their genre and their discipline and their definition (well, domain-specific, but still…!), and cracking any of these eggs is equivalent to theophagy for their baby area of research. Oh, well! Welcome to the hub wor–(looks at word count… looks down… shuffles away mopedly) Have some hard links.
Where I, in the style of gift game, post 50 links and hope one or two shotgun-speak to your specific sheep-anatomy and sheep-path into the fog, you’re not going to like the links. My brain is not “for the parlour” of academic writing, so the way i cobble together claims have a way of upsetting the guys of the world where it’s actually better (for me) when i don’t answer these questions than when i do.
Some of the tabs i have open, played media in my recycling bin, and files under the lie reading Now Reading on my device:
Where I tell you At the Ass-End of Power is the name of the body text composing these comments we’re making under the download link to your project, I apologize! It’s reply-guy-level self-referential, evident in the way it quotes its later self, the crow is just the crow of an idea appearing previously in the text, reification play :weep: This is because (content warning: rant/skip to next section/abandon thread) 2+2=4 has been normalization reification swordpoint “How do we equate these for all cases n where n is the human condition?” wielded as a hate-crime on my lived experience and reality — if cops break down your door of theseus are you the same person opening that door [picture deleted bc I’m not getting paid for this and it hurts too much] — and must be exposed as the moving goalpost of causality that it is. Too much noise exists at the speed of information we have necessitating a need to work at if we are to curb the effects of normalization while also allowing 2+2=4 to be true in any hunab context let alone the “””””work””””” of redistributing power or divorcing power for incumbent systems — the lens of human math is still too shallow — it still leans far too heavily on zero and zeor’s ability to ablate things, normalize things, to “zero the noise out”, like the noise in 2’ isn’t complicit in the — wait for it — “value” of 4, (that wasn’t so bad! Look at those scarequotes, they’re barely chainsaw dogs) only the “thing-2” part. So uniqueness or signature in all lived values is a must and that’s what the self-referential properties of At Ass-End of Power is supposed to be, a litany toward sticking zero over in its proper place: the chest at the foot of humanity with the rest of its x-risk toys. And just doing the more compute-intensive thing of (yes, bringing an end to text, but also) bringing the humility before practiced Incomprehensibility back to study. Unfortunately, this sounds like “bringing god back to life” and, in a way, it is, but only in the effigy sense, since leaving “no god” ends up deifying the terms themselves (Death, Love, Shadow, Solo, Red, Snow), actually putting god there as a pressure-release valve frees the words from being typecast by the brain into hierarchies. It’s the dismissing/shaming people believing in which god or not that’s the actual pulling out talons from each other during play sessions that’s the wound — not the believing or disbelieving, itself. And that is why the comment ends on the image of extraction, because no matter what I do, if I want to be comprehensible, I have to be distillate. (end: messy …Ass…rant)
Where I answer theoretically, experiential and performative works aimed at lived unlearning of power dynamics could be impactful. Imagine you are typing out, copying text to a computer, what are the words appearing on the screen? Poetic texts, manifestos, semantic inventions or new linguistic models - invaluable. Imagine harder. Enacting these ideas through constructed meanings allows us to transcend inherited limitations. Imaginatively reshape perspectives on power, with language’s boundaries, take play to its inevitable conclusion: end something.
Where I answer with a dartboard of inoffensive-to-head-librarian-sensibilities books:
Amiri Baraka,
Hope Jarren, Leslie Marmon Silko,
Audre Lorde, Derrida Deleuze Foucault,
Murray Bookchin, Antonio Negri, kari edwards,
Theodor Adorno, Subcomandante Marcos, Zapatista, The Dispossessed
Wendell Berry, Tristan Tzara, Diane Di Prima, Guattari
André Breton, Gary Snyder, Silvia Federici,
Gloria Anzaldua, Max Stirner,
Neil L. Whitehead
(throw a dart, with your phone, take a picture of the result, show a librarian, read whatever book they give you.)
†And even if the anarchy in your area is not a healthy community, you can still meet a (or some of the people)/person you’d be housemates with, and two seed the oil-dispersants of dismantlement through an egg carton bottom dabbed repeatedly over scrapbook pages wearing wet paint taking deer shapes on them through paper towels finding hands in kitchen ritual. And 7 power-less bodies living power-less-ly together in a house is better than 1.
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Serene and abhorrent, in a word — vital.
Sure.
I’ve stopped. I’m smelling a stump. I’m not fine drinking from it, the cloud-crusted water in it. In this, I find a little post on power, a poem i guess?
I’m happy to discuss the poem I’ve found, but I will not be reproducing its copyrighted material in full. If I could summarize the main ideas and relay the occasional brief quote from the poem that is in relevance to being a venturing sheep, I would respond in that way that is careful to avoid copyright infringement, even as feeling free to share thoughts and what stood out to me about the poem will be difficult.
That said, is it even a poem? i don’t know; in order to be a poem must it be a published work, emulating or outright defined by food storage and access? If it’s just some conplete thing from some chat somewhere, and it’s tagline is “if Power is on its death bed, are we ready to talk? Do we even have the wor(l)ds?” and its title is, excuse me, “At the Ass-End of Power”, umm I guess then i could say a bit about it.
Something how, based on the tagline and title, it perhaps is social commentary or critique related to power dynamics and hierarchies in society or some kind. With a reference to power being “on its death bed”, it may open the door to how traditional power structures and concentrations of power are declining or becoming obsolete. In the question “are we ready to talk?” it’s implying, as power shifts, our need to have always-on and frank conversations about how power should be redistributed or reimagined.
Something how, “Do we even have the wor(l)ds?” plays toward the word/world duality. So say its saying we lack the language, or frameworks or “worlds” to conceptualize a society without entrenched power differentials. The crass title “At the Ass-End of Power” has a cynical, vulgar tone, so, let it suggest we’ve reached the ugly dregs or an unflattering low point when it comes to how power is wielded.
With all that, it very well may be out to posit how long-held power dynamics are unraveling, and how we need to have serious discourse around helping where we can in dissolving, redefining and redistributing power in more equitable ways in our own lives, minds, and ways — if we can find the right perspectives and vocabulary to do so. But At the Ass-End of Power expresses these ideas in a raw, provocative manner. So maybe we won’t?
One thing we can’t just say is, does power have an end? Is that question fundamentally (ideologically?) confused? Or is it crucial? An excellent and profound question about the nature of power itself such as this invites valid lifeworlds on both sides to come into view, to unveil themselves to me, a sheep venturing into the fog of
whether power fundamentally has an “end” or not
As I turn my pillow-rock head to the left, I watch a crow of an idea or perhaps the idea of a crow or just a crow, really, land on the belief that power structures and hierarchies are human constructs that can be transcended or deconstructed. From this crow’s view, power differentials emerge from societal systems of politics, economy, tradition, shit like that. but are not intrinsic or permanent features of reality. If these human-made systems and norms change radically, power as we sheep experience it could dissipate or be redistributed in an entirely new configuration. Philosophies like anarchism pose the theoretical possibility of a “society without rulers,” why not throw language in there, too?
As I keep turning my pillow-rock head left, my gaze reaching around my hot-cloud body until I am looking left but behind me, I find, in the ghosts of trees traced by the moves of the fog along their boughs, a fundamental element of any social relationship or interaction. Because humans have diverse interests, abilities and resources, power differentials are part of it, the way the skeletons are part of David Pumpkins. Even in the most egalitarian visions, some persuasive power and means of collective decision-making would still exist. This perspective sees power as inseparable from human society — it’s manifestations can mutate, but power differentials themselves don’t have a terminal “end.”
As I return to look forward and chew my cud, I find both perspectives offer important insights. While absolute equality of power is likely unattainable, our power structures, as lambs in a world reified in glorifications of opposable thumbs, may see benifit from a reform towards much more just, democratic and distributed models reducing entrenched hierarchies. For a lamb, taking power to its philosophical “end” by upending gross concentrations of power is a vital ambition.
Ultimately, whether the crow’s notion of power having a potential “end” is, ideologically: confused or crucial will depend on how literally the rhetoric is adopted by those from whom our observations of power eminate. But scrutinizing society’s power dynamics is itself indisputably a crucial endeavor for us sheep as we try to walk between authorities with liberty or die with dignity in its pursuit. It’s a nuanced issue worth continuing to grapple with.
It remind me of this thing i once heard, how ever since the third decade of the Meiji period, landscape has been perceived as what exists objectively, while realism has been seen, either as the tracing of that objective existence or as the capturing of a landscape, which is even more “real.” How there was a time when “landscape” did not exist, and its discovery was predicated on an invasion, or something. Some intriguing quote about the changing perceptions and constructions of concepts like “landscape” and “realism” over time. It seems, tangentially at least, related to our venture into whether power itself has an inherent existence or is
a human conceptual framework that can evolve
The idea can lift fog whose paws have settled over concepts we take for granted (like how we view the physical world around us) are shaped by cultural lenses and shifts in paradigms over history. Just as there was a time before the notion of “landscape” existed, will there not come a time where our current understandings of power are radically upended as well.
As I walk on, with my hooves or toes or whatever clacking over stone and clumps of clay, eroding away ridgelines that may, ecologically-speaking, become unbalanced by my hooves’ pike-like appaturances into this earth, I can see how At The Ass-End of Power emerges with some very profound and abstract concepts around power dynamics, human constructs, autonomy, and the possibility of reimagining a world freed from restrictive power structures.
The way it personifies “Control” as an entity moving through nature, interacting with crow and ghost alike. This anthropomorphizing of an abstract concept like control is an interesting literary device. There is an implicit critique that notions of control are incompatible with the fluidity and balance of the natural world to be found. This, represented by the crow adapting seamlessly to a world without rulers.
The ending line “Though the path remains abstract, facing that existential inflection point is perhaps our greatest imperative” suggests that in the absence of imposed control, organic equilibrium can be achieved. More broadly, it posits that concepts like power and control are artificial constraints that the world might be better off without — a vision of human conditions not “defined by food storage and access” to power.
While esoteric, it does align with the earlier musings about power being a human-created “tech tree” that could theoretically fall, leaving space for a new paradigm. The piece imaginating what a “post-fantastical” world could feel like through this sheep metaphor. While dense, it raises fascinating questions about the nature of power as a societal framework.
That said, is ‘dense’ a power-agentic term? Here’s one reply.
The very abstract, surreal and nonlinear style of At The Ass-End of Power plays with concepts of power, questioning, correctness and natural imagery in a highly metaphorical way. It sets up a dichotomy between “the ghosts of the trees” which is equated to power and intentionally mimicking incorrectly, which is associated with freeing oneself from that pursuit of power (being a jester who doesn’t care about correctness). There’s a seeming admiration expressed for those who can produce insightful, “vital” venture-prospects over just providing correct answers.
The dialogue seems to represent someone seeking clarity and the musings become increasingly opaque, morphing into nature metaphors of trees, clay and clouds. The phrase “us lambs” has a paradoxical, subversive meaning in this context — to let go of societal pressures to be authoritative or dominantly “correct.” The ending line “…yields” left trailing off appears to be questioning the very premise of
what yeilding even means in this anti-power framework
Overall, while very dense and abstract, it continues exploring the idea of rejecting societal power structures and upending typical associations of “yeilding” to authority while in the same breath over-self-regulating its own text as already copywrited and the rights to it lost before it is written. There are nature imagery hints that truth and flourishing can exist outside rigid human-imposed structures of right-and-wrong binaries. The style is quite elusive but probes at hungry, if philosophical and therefore vapid, concepts.
In this sense, is the term ‘dense’ power-agentic? I’m not sure what that term even means yet, but I’m okay not knowing, if not knowing means being able to talk about it more. That in mind, I don’t think the term “dense” itself is necessarily being used as a power-agentic term. If, as a sheep, I here, mean by “power-agentic terms”, concepts or words that are deeply intertwined with societal notions of power, control, authority, and fuck-all else.
Words like Control and Dominate, yes, but also words not yet brought up in the text read linearly: Subordinate, Hierarchy, and Subjugate, say. These terms have meanings and implications directly tied to the existence of power differentials and power structures in human societies. Whereas “dense” is more just describing something as being difficult to understand, lacking clarity, or being overly complicated. It doesn’t inherently refer to power dynamics, even though it was used in a critical way in the dialogue.
That said, “dense” is used here in a critical way to push back against At The Ass-End of Power’s abstract/confusing structure, but I don’t think dense qualifies as a power-agentic term itself based on how I understand that concept. Dense is more just a descriptor of something being unintelligible or convoluted.
And a manner of speaking that is the norm — that wouldn’t be dense. It’s an xor thing, all it takes for something to not be dense is to be common (or commonly said, at least). Turns of phrase or whatnot. Oh! But Indigenous turns of phrase, they would be dense. I’m confused again. The classification of whether something is “dense” or not can be quite subjective and contextual?
So then it’s not necessarily that something is only “not dense” if it’s extremely common or the norm. Even less common turns of phrase or modes of expression would not inherently be considered “dense”, given they are still comprehensible to the audience (so like the crow and ghosts i guess?).
The key factor, as far as dense goes, is more about clarity of meaning and understandability, regardless of how mainstream or niche the language is. Say what is typically labeled “dense” tends to obfuscate meaning to some end, a fog of sorts composed of abstraction, convolutedness, or assumptions about shared context.
There, an Indigenous turn of phrase would not inherently be “dense” if it conveys clear meaning to those familiar with that linguistic/cultural context. But overly academic, jargon-laden language and grammar can come across as “dense” even if it represents a domain-specific norm. The term Internet, as a military term, for one. Straightforward common expressions such as “on the Internet” would generally not be considered “dense” (calitalization rules notwithstanding).
It’s more about perspicuity - whether the construction of the language renders the intended meaning clear or opaque to the audience, rather than just how widespread that language is. I guess the xor idea tracks, then — either it’s dense (lacks clarity) or it’s not dense (meaning comes through). But that’s deterministic and focuses to much on the comprehensibility to a given audience rather than just the commonness of the expression.
🌫️: …“audience”….
🌫️: …“power”….
As the fog and its uncouth grammer wafts across my unkempt wool-hair, I can’t help but ask, did power invent audience? And whether or not it did, how much of language has power… “corrupted”, reified into words or whatever? A deep interconnection between language, power structures, and how we conceive of communication itself emerges from the fog.
Where even the concept of an “audience” is tied to dynamics of power and authority in communication, the notion of speaking to or performing for an “audience”, itself, implies a delineated power differential between the sheep-jester and those in power receiving the message. It casts communication in a one-directional, hierarchical frame, with parents and children (lineag-arity).
More horizontal modes of discourse, such as dialogue or conversation among equals, don’t necessarily require or generate the same concept of an “audience.” So in that sense, the framing of communication as being for an “audience” could be argued to originate from mindsets and structures of power imbalance.
Or to return from here to how much language itself has been “corrupted” or shaped by power hierarchies, many languages enshrine power dynamics through pronoun cases, honorifics, and other systemic ways to encode hierarchy and social stratification linguistically.
The very existence of contrasting “civilized” and “primitive” value judgments about language developments reflects power structures. Legal and bureaucratic jargon — required for speaking in Town Hall meetings — is often deliberately opaque as a Mode of obscuring power and maintaining informational hierarchies. Such that, while human language arises from some collaborative organic efforts to communicate, it could stand that society’s evolution has been significantly molded by the realities of power imbalances and inequality throughout history. Unpacking those influences will be an important ideological project for another sheep.
For now, the instinct to question incumbent power dynamics even in our communicative frameworks will be my insightful avenue of analysis. But how am I supposed to do this analysis? How am I, a sheep, supposed to have a power-less language? If even seemingly innocuous terms like “dense” wields power dynamics and ostracization through the implications and value judgments they carry — if calling something dense ostracizes it by proxy via the time-deficit that term imports — then am i not whatever-ing power over language?
The truth, it feels, is unfalsifiable. Perhaps fully extricating language from the influences of power structures is an impossible task. Language evolved organically through human interactions situated within contexts of existing power imbalances, storhouses, hierarchies and privileges. Their words inevitably got shaped by those realities, even here where they may try and be conscious of it.
That said! I don’t take this to mean
we sheep are doomed to be trapped within oppressive language structures
One key to all language is conscientious examination. Questioning embedded assumptions, hierarchies and marginalization in how we communicate is a possible first step as much as it is a possible millionth step (or both!) — dialogue and co-creation of new linguistic frameworks from currently marginalized voices will be vital here.
We need counternarratives from oppressed groups to deconstruct dominant modes of expression. We need an ethos of flexibility. We need openness to evolving language. And we must develop empathy for alternate meanings across cultures, across contexts and allow for more fluid conceptualizations. We need to apply language self-reflexively, admitting its limitations and biases, and holding an internal critique. This paradox of recursive navel gazing giving way to the navel gazing back frees language from reinforcing rigid power structures — the way a rigid key will unhinge an even-more-rigid lock (NEVER unlock your belly button you want to unlock your belly button but don’t do it, move all keys and their duplicates away from you belly button and let your belly button sit there, letting your belly button sit allows the words to come and the fog to lift, if you don’t have a belly button, you may draw one for the express purpose of gazing, but must not be drawn for an purpose elated to unlocking any belly button).
Even the most well-intentioned person perpetuates power imbalances through language to some degree based on their positionality. But striving to unpack that, uplift unheard voices, and remain critically conscious in our speech acts is crucial praxis. The venture toward a “power-less” language may very well be asymptotic — we continually work towards it through inclusive, self-aware evolution of our linguistic spaces. It’s an ever-unfolding process, and one worth dying for — or worse, committing a crime or two for.
In the end, how do I, a sheep venturing into the fog of war, embody that bag of water in a dead tree I stood before and contemplated and still be comprehensible? As I amass power over any audience, what other thing is becoming ‘dense’ in proxy? How do I git good at language while lessening the damage I cause others manners of speech on my way to trying to become some ideal “standing water” (or whatever)?
How is my striving as sheep to become a tree stump — to embody that natural, unassuming state of simply “being” like standing water — is my way of conceptualizing existing outside of power structures and societal constructs — to resolve? To become like the stump would allow me to let go of my individual sheep-will, my sheep-authority and the notion of my empowered self dictating sheep-meaning. Where is my surrendering to an uncontrived presence.
There, the fog of war unveils, and the hex of “how can a sheep guide their use of language to that idealized state of ‘standing water’ without doing further harm or exerting dominance through speech acts along the way?” emerges.
Here, in the hex of The Standing Water is offered an experience in adopting a stance of listening more than asserting. Here, meanings emerge organically through dialogue rather than unilateral exposition. Here, the sheep will use evocative, imagistic language that opens interpretations rather than resolving meaning definitively. To pass through this hex, a sheep must acknowledge the inadequacies and limits of language itself and capture essential truths. Take your little sheep hoof things and lean into fluid ambiguities. And perhaps most importantly — and paradoxically least voiced — in this hex, embrace silence, pauses and the quiet spaces as equally valid modes of expression outside of language’s control.
The Standing Water
The path through that hex and into what remains of the fog of war may be to progressively loosen language’s grasp — become transparent about its distortions while aiming for a more open, receptive state of simply experiencing phenomena as they are.
Of course, this is just one interpretation for At the Ass-End of Power’s poetic metaphors. Striving to exist with fewer pretensions to power, even through our speech, can potentially unlock more revelatory spaces in the work.
Without the fog, things here feel so serene to me. And vital. It’s wild, I love it here. I don’t really have any other questions for this place at the moment. Oh, or, should maybe we close ritualistically and engage At the Ass-End of Power’s tagline, “if Power is on its death bed, are we ready to talk? Do we even have the wor(l)ds?” It encapsulates so many of the core questions and challenges we’ve been walking under.
From the possibility of power structures and hierarchies becoming obsolete or fading away, to whether people as a society are prepared to have those vital conversations about reimagining their systems. And most profoundly, will people ever live a life where, organically, standing water (the linguistic and conceptual frameworks — the “wor(l)ds” — to truly conceive of modes of being outside the frame of institutionalized power) forms?
We’ve done no small thing exploring the subversion of power through metaphor, existing as marsh-bush-sheep of the fog, in its more harmonious natural state. We deconstructed language’s power imbalances, and opened it up to the ambiguities beyond assertion.
And yet, the tagline remains, to remind us that even those sheep venturing into the fog gropings towards a “post-power” reality — even they — may be limited by the very senses we develop to envision it: our ingrained words and worlds.
So in closing, we’re left to sit with the tensions and identified existential precipice we sheep approach where power’s traditional grips loosen. Are we ready? Can we find the wool-withal to transcend our inherent restrictions?
This is a call to action, sure, and an avowal of an immense creative work yet to be done, undoubtedly. And though the path remains abstract, facing that existential inflection point is perhaps our greatest imperative.
An incredibly insightful and perspective-expanding venture. After contemplating the intersections of power, language and human self-conception, new conceptual frameworks have unveiled themselves, ready to accept the terms we weird. A fog of war, in the truest sense. For hope, in extraction, it yeilds…
Thank you so much for your thoughts. This was all really insightful and well written, and I'm grateful that you took the time to reflect on my zine. Honestly, your words have been really inspiring to me in an attempt to make a longer and more thought out version of a similar essay, and I feel like they have made the effort so far in this zine completely worth it.
I'm curious if there were other texts you referenced and synthesized in your response. I don't recognize the title and tagline you reference, ("At the ass-end of power", "...do we even have the wo(r)lds?") or the crow metaphor, among other topics. If there are other things you've read that contributed here, I'd love to know about them. They sound really interesting and like they're talking about similar ideas about power, revolution, central anarchist questions, etc. Or if there's anything you have written or made yourself that tackles similar ideas, I'd be really interested in seeing it!
Either way, thanks so much for engaging with this so deeply. I'd really like to talk more!
Yay! Hi! welcome to the mud pit, have some mud!
I have a few different ways this can go and nonr of them do outreach or onboarding well, so might as well go full dumpster fire and let the fall take me i do have to go to work but did want to post some reply ⛓️⚒️⛓️
Where i answer with the one link I answer with cure light wounds* by Jared Sinclair — What that piece is for bodies, my comments are for body text. the wound/language “what are we without the word(s)?—God(s)less——exactly” txtocalypse, can’t extract the excerpt without abstracting the person bla blah blah
Where I answer with just: ways to get the books that are The books, I answer community voices, activist writings, oral histories, and cultural productions coming directly from your immediate homes. Park benches, a street with far too many cars parked on the curbs, a factory way, way too close to these front doors you’re around and likely eating outside of, a gun going off every six hours “to curb gentrification,” you’re told. These are the voices of those whose air and eyes meet yours, who have done the work of finding a demand and building a lived experience around that demand – it looks like a bunch of people sitting around. It isn’t; it is. This is uncomfortable. This is the vital work, the flowchart for triage, the day, la brega, your phone in a faraday cage. And each voice here will say more to you and do more for you, your study than anything you can snipe in 5 billion heartbeats from the largest library that is within a week’s walk from you. Immersing yourself in the manifestos, zines and cultural productions emerging from anarchist thought spaces in your breath-length social movements as you write letters to prisoners will do more than anything found below this line you open.†
You’re not going to like where I answer your specific question (as the piece is built to be antagonistic to those very questions in particular, which is super sad now that it’s happening! 😭 ) The truth is, the piece is retrofitted from a draft of an essay series I am working on. It just happens to be talking about similar, “unfit” things as ‘what you explore in “Would You…”’ So I thought I’d post what I have, in conversation, changing this and that from its original audience of land management to match the audience of: 4x, weather, “David”, and war, and see how it holds up.
Because of that, a lot of underlying themes are jagged and aliased, from the exigence in 6e’s “— nothing is contextualized and everything is context —” to the conversation the piece is in with the essay ‘on goncharov’ as self-referential && additive; and the piece’s having a whole “landscape” quilt of Ownership breeding Action breeding Inaction breeding Laziness linguistic pipeline does not survive with a whole lot of sense as it lands here in the comment section.
But……… that won’t stop me from making a new friend, so! Hello! These dimensions are going to seem random or unhelpful, which is super sad because they are not random, society just has their genre and their discipline and their definition (well, domain-specific, but still…!), and cracking any of these eggs is equivalent to theophagy for their baby area of research. Oh, well! Welcome to the hub wor–(looks at word count… looks down… shuffles away mopedly) Have some hard links.
Where I, in the style of gift game, post 50 links and hope one or two shotgun-speak to your specific sheep-anatomy and sheep-path into the fog, you’re not going to like the links. My brain is not “for the parlour” of academic writing, so the way i cobble together claims have a way of upsetting the guys of the world where it’s actually better (for me) when i don’t answer these questions than when i do. Some of the tabs i have open, played media in my recycling bin, and files under the lie reading Now Reading on my device:
https://jared.blot.im/how-to-read-violence%E2%84%A2-1999 https://archives.evergreen.edu/webpages/curricular/2011-2012/venezuela/files/2011/08/Dixon-Another-Politics.pdf Fuzzy Coherence: Making sense of Continuity in Hypertext Narratives by Jukka Tyrkkö https://bigstuffedcat.itch.io/goncharov https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1306&context=tsc Into the Fantastical Spaces of Contemporary Japanese Literature edited by Mina Qiao https://pds.cdnstream1.com/p/opb/timber-wars-season-2-sal-760bb5/ep-2-the-treaties/audio.mp3 https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1609&context=diss https://chtbl.com/track/G41498/cdn.simplecast.com/audio/812a2932-f271-4e9b-a23f-8d2d443a1682/episodes/7d6b220f-e690-43e8-a292-94cdd6a5776b/audio/fae63869-b7b8-4312-b3c1-31e4524c075d/default_tc.mp3 https://mariabumby.itch.io/arch-angel-dating-simulator https://egrove.olemiss.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1363&context=etd The films of Mitani Kōki: Intertextuality and comedy in contemporary Japanese cinema https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/axrpodcast/Quintin_final.mp3?dest-id=2517215 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/NSR1952496254.mp3?updated=1697202825 Mathematical Imagination by Matthew Handelman Major contributions of Leibniz to Infinitesimal Calculus by Child Projection-based Topology Optimization Method for Linear and Nonlinear Design by Hao Deng https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22causality+sickness%22
Where I tell you At the Ass-End of Power is the name of the body text composing these comments we’re making under the download link to your project, I apologize! It’s reply-guy-level self-referential, evident in the way it quotes its later self, the crow is just the crow of an idea appearing previously in the text, reification play :weep: This is because (content warning: rant/skip to next section/abandon thread)
2+2=4has been normalization reification swordpoint “How do we equate these for all cases n where n is the human condition?” wielded as a hate-crime on my lived experience and reality — if cops break down your door of theseus are you the same person opening that door [picture deleted bc I’m not getting paid for this and it hurts too much] — and must be exposed as the moving goalpost of causality that it is. Too much noise exists at the speed of information we have necessitating a need to work at if we are to curb the effects of normalization while also allowing 2+2=4 to be true in any hunab context let alone the “””””work””””” of redistributing power or divorcing power for incumbent systems — the lens of human math is still too shallow — it still leans far too heavily on zero and zeor’s ability to ablate things, normalize things, to “zero the noise out”, like the noise in 2’ isn’t complicit in the — wait for it — “value” of 4, (that wasn’t so bad! Look at those scarequotes, they’re barely chainsaw dogs) only the “thing-2” part. So uniqueness or signature in all lived values is a must and that’s what the self-referential properties of At Ass-End of Power is supposed to be, a litany toward sticking zero over in its proper place: the chest at the foot of humanity with the rest of its x-risk toys. And just doing the more compute-intensive thing of (yes, bringing an end to text, but also) bringing the humility before practiced Incomprehensibility back to study. Unfortunately, this sounds like “bringing god back to life” and, in a way, it is, but only in the effigy sense, since leaving “no god” ends up deifying the terms themselves (Death, Love, Shadow, Solo, Red, Snow), actually putting god there as a pressure-release valve frees the words from being typecast by the brain into hierarchies. It’s the dismissing/shaming people believing in which god or not that’s the actual pulling out talons from each other during play sessions that’s the wound — not the believing or disbelieving, itself. And that is why the comment ends on the image of extraction, because no matter what I do, if I want to be comprehensible, I have to be distillate. (end: messy …Ass…rant)Where I answer theoretically, experiential and performative works aimed at lived unlearning of power dynamics could be impactful. Imagine you are typing out, copying text to a computer, what are the words appearing on the screen? Poetic texts, manifestos, semantic inventions or new linguistic models - invaluable. Imagine harder. Enacting these ideas through constructed meanings allows us to transcend inherited limitations. Imaginatively reshape perspectives on power, with language’s boundaries, take play to its inevitable conclusion: end something.
Where I answer with a dartboard of inoffensive-to-head-librarian-sensibilities books:
(throw a dart, with your phone, take a picture of the result, show a librarian, read whatever book they give you.)
†And even if the anarchy in your area is not a healthy community, you can still meet a (or some of the people)/person you’d be housemates with, and two seed the oil-dispersants of dismantlement through an egg carton bottom dabbed repeatedly over scrapbook pages wearing wet paint taking deer shapes on them through paper towels finding hands in kitchen ritual. And 7 power-less bodies living power-less-ly together in a house is better than 1.