tristan jones

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being. Therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people don’t know that. Every time I tried to go into a public place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, “He’s a human being; don’t stop him.” That bill was for the white man, not for me. I knew I could vote all the time and that it wasn’t a privilege but my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived. So somebody had to write a bill to tell white people, “When a black man comes to vote, don’t bother him.” That bill was for white people.

Why always replace one commander with another? Why not recognize once and for all what we have learned over and over again in this book: that action is slightly overtaken by what it acts upon; that it drifts through translation; that an experiment is an event which offers slightly more than it inputs; that chains of mediations are not the same thing as an effortless passage from cause to effect; that transfers of information never occur except through subtle and multiple transformations; that there is no such thing as the imposition of categories upon a formless matter; and that, in the realm of techniques, no one is in command - not because technology is in command, but because, truly, no one and nothing at all, is in command, not even an anonymous field of force? To be in command, or to master, is a property of neither humans nor nonhumans, nor even of God. It was thought to be a property of objects and subjects, except that it never worked: actions always overflowed themselves, and gnarled entanglements always ensued. The ban on theology, so important in the staging of the modernist predicament, will not be lifted by a return to the God of Creation but, on the contrary, by the realization that there is no master at all. That religion was too seized by modernists as oil for their political war machine, that theology debased itself by agreeing to a role in the modernist settlement and betrayed itself even to the point of talking about nature “out there,” the soul “in here,” and society “down there,” will, I hope, serve as a source of bewilderment for the next generation.

BECAUSE we recognize fantasies of Instant Macho Gun Revolution as impractical lies meant to keep us simply dreaming instead of becoming our dreams AND THUS seek to create revolution in our own lives every single day by envisioning and creating alternatives to the bullshit christian capitalist way of doing things.

A human being at rest runs on 90 watts … that’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.