Tell Dracula His Kung-Fu Death is Real: A Thousand Devils.

more medallions for the devoted

In the growing flarf conversation one can't but pay attention to Mohammad's work. He picks the eerie pieces of our anonymous conversations---comment boxes, blog posts, message boards, chat rooms, status updates---and coalesces them together into snapshots of our digital-unconsciousness. There's no doubt that America has long been a violent place, founded in revolution, constantly beating down any insurrectionary movement inside and out, so that the general perspective of our culture is one which has decided it can instantly fill the roles of judge and executioner. Watching the news coverage the day of 9/11 my boss at the time stated that we should nuke Iraq and turn it into a parking lot. Considering consequences is just a means of delaying the stick, the positivist version of theory and praxis. And so Mohammad taps into the instantaneous gratification of each user letting their id hide behind their insignificance within his texts. It's no wonder he doesn't laugh when he reads his poems. We can tap Zizek on the shoulder (knowing I'm not the first to do this); first as tragedy, then as flarf.

Some say fire and some say ice; I say fire and ice
And digital cable. I say every iconoclast has its price.

The terms of this debate then shift from developing a left movement which finds itself in conflict with this violence, and one which incubates this alongside that of resistance. As we learned in The Coming Insurrection, "An authentic pacifisim cannot mean refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them. Pacifism without being able to fire a shot is nothing but the theoretical formulation of impotence."

Mohammad reminds us that there is a large part of our population still eliding impotence and violent aggression. Yet we also know that we live in a temporality of flux; the impotence of peaceful protests without the means to defend oneself is being reformulated in Thailand; the violent aggressors of the internet hope, more than anything, to keep their day jobs, where they can continue to preach dependence, nihilism, the trick pony of 'growing up.' The trick is to reverse this shape and the debate it is premised upon. An anonymous aggression in opposition to structural impotence. Less Pfizer, more philos.

K. Silem Mohammad, great flarfist circa post-modernity, can be found here.