Hello all,
I am pleased to announce “Without Hindrance”, my latest release under the conceptual multimedia alias Auton. This cassette tape and zine of critical text is being released by the San Francisco-based label Left Hand Path
From the website:
Left Hand Path is proud to welcome “Without Hindrance” – the latest in a series of mixed-media releases from Auton that explores the nature of insurrectionary rupture and the possibility to challenge the hegemony of power and violence held by the State. Following up on 2018’s “La Lotta Continua” for Jacktone and the 2019 “Tute Bianche” EP (and its subsequent reconstructions) via TRAM Planet, “Without Hindrance” exists as a study of the events of the May ’68 uprising in France, its capitulation to the spectacle of electoralism, and decline brought on by the failure to seize upon the moment of ultimate potential.
This release is housed in a clear vinyl bag and contains a professionally dubbed and printed audio cassette, featuring four original Auton tracks written between 2018 and 2019, as well as four reconstructions of these tracks by Andrew Nolan, Nihar, 51717 and Chaperone.
Also included is a full-color professionally-printed zine written in early 2019 by AE and anarchist tactician Tom Nomad (author of “The Master’s Tools” and “Toward An Army Of Ghosts”) which explores the ritualized behaviors of the radical milieu, the nature of the State and its capacity for intelligent evil, and ways forward that draw from the tradition of The Situationists in their articulation of a decentralized and constant insurrection of daily life.
The various elements of the release are drawn together with gorgeous hand-collaged artwork by Ashley Hohman, whose flair for brutal psychedelia compliments the techno-paranoiac sound and elegiac prose.
I wrote much of this music and text while living in Cleveland in 2018-2019, and am pleased with being able to release it now in 2021 and find I am still satisfied with it as a whole. The text written in 2018 in particular – both my own as well as Tom Nomad – has aged quite well, given the lessons that 2020 has taught us as anarchists of uprising, momentum, electoralism and the recuperative force that can be mobilized in the service of counterinsurgency. If an addendum to the zine is needed upon the light of retrospect of the last year that clarifies those writings absolutely, it is that the idea of creating constant insurrection out of the spontaneous conditions of everyday life are those which are the least able to be contained by the state or it’s allies of far-right and liberal counterinsurgents. The leaderless, spontaneous and brutal acts of incendiary uprising against the state are those worthy of solidarity and valor – the nameless actors responsible empowered others to act in a similarly uncontainable fashion as true partisans of their self-interest – namely, in acting without remorse against the structures and manifestations of the state. The great spectacles of mass mobilization that followed in their wake served various emotional and symbolic purpose – valid at that – but easily guided away from destabilizing potential by liberal reformists, communist organization opportunists and – although Joe Biden’s election was hardly a referendum in favor of Black autonomy from police surveillance and violence – democratic party electoralists. The critique of electoralism’s role in the dissipation of energy in the May ’68 uprising is echoed by the even-further-decomposed election of a political regime whose favor is less in naked aggression, but in “smarter” and “community-led” policing – just as violent and monopolistic on force but with the veneer of technocratic liberalism to appease well-to-do liberals who found the idea of the police as the previous administration’s footsoldiers only-momentarily distasteful.
An additional point that is worthy of return in 2021 is how the culture of conspiracy theory, state-hegemon campism, deep state subterfuge and false-flag narratives has deeply infected the left. The constant rumination of the left on agent-provocateur activity was a running theme that resulted in counterinsurgency within our own milieu – in its least materially-consequential form in seeding the paranoiac belief of the state as an all-powerful actor imbued with a malignant evil; and in its most consequential, resulting in the left doxxing insurrectionists and aiding in the repression of the movement in an appeal to liberal respectability. To act, we must recognize that the state – while able to crush individuals and groups in its particular and narrow sights – largely relies on the implict promise of surveillance – the spy at the door, the bug in the lamp, the informant in your social circle – rather than the direct manifestation of this surveillance in real-world spaces. Although the state- in an effort to endlessly perpetuate its existence against those who declare themselves sovereign of it’s control – does choose to target and entrap people in our movement, it does this largely to create a mystifying and repressive cybernetic omnipresence upon which it can rely to paralyze us from acting. Feeding into this strategy of repression by casting every act of insurrection as somehow being a scripted move in the deep state master plan (a spurious entity at that – Leviathan doesn’t need to hide deeper within itself) results in nothing but militants unable to act, and too fearful of their communities to keep silent. The accelerating decomposition of politics and reality will no-doubt exacerbate this paranoia, and it thus is something I believe will be with us all through this next wave of repression.
(Note: if i find more within my readthrough of the zine that I find relatable to life now, I will try to circle back and include it here for organization’s sake.)
I want to take the time to thank all of the people who helped bring this Auton release to the public – the crew at Left Hand Path including especially Nihar, Chris, Jason, Brian and Sylvia; Mark Pistel for his careful work on mastering this release; Tom Nomad for being a mentor, trusted friend and collaborator; Aragorn! for being a foundational presence- Rest In Power; Kyle at Outlandish Press for printing the zine; the remix artists Andrew (who also introduced me to the Situationists’ writing), Lili and David; and of course Ashley for her beautiful collage pieces that drew these pieces together as a singular item.
Please support the label. Digital and physical versions of this release can be found on their bandcamp page.
I hope that the first month of the new year has treated everyone as least-poorly as can be expected in this time – thank you for your continued support.
Love and solidarity,
ae
