Beyond Ken Knabb
From the Imaginable to the Functioning
In the half-century since 1968, radical theory has often oscillated between two dead ends: academic abstraction and lifestyle utopianism. In universities, entire schools of thought polished their language into opacity, producing critical gestures more concerned with citation than with action. Outside the academy, the radical imagination fragmented into temporary utopias: communes, squats, eco-villages, libertarian colonies, “zones” of alternative culture. Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zones became a touchstone in the 1990s, but most of these experiments were recuperated almost as quickly as they were proclaimed. They defined themselves as “outside” the system, and everything that defines itself as outside can be tolerated, commodified, folklorized. What was once hailed as insurrection soon became music festivals, tourist attractions, or harmless subcultural niches.
Ken Knabb belongs to neither camp. His work — collected in Public Secrets (1997), and especially the long text The Joy of Revolution — represents one of the clearest attempts to cut through both the jargon of academia and the self-delusion of countercultural separatism. He speaks in plain prose, yet his clarity does not mean simplification. It means rigor: an insistence on criteria, on distinctions that actually matter.
Most importantly, Knabb does not stop at denunciation. He begins by demolishing false alternatives — state socialism and parliamentary reformism, both of which, as he points out, are capitalist “in every essential respect.” But he goes further. He insists on a vital difference between representation and delegation. Representation, he writes, means abdicating: handing over power to rulers who act in your name, without control or recourse. Delegation, by contrast, is temporary, specific, and always revocable. Delegates are not rulers but entrusted agents, strictly limited and subject to recall. This distinction is not mere semantics; it is the practical line between autonomy and domination.
Knabb is also attentive to history. Again and again, when people truly took their lives into their own hands, they created councils. Russia in 1905 and 1917. Kronstadt in 1921. Germany and Italy after the First World War. Spain in 1936. Hungary in 1956. Each time, ordinary people generated structures of self-organization that worked — for a moment. Each time, those structures were crushed, either by external repression or by internal cooptation. As Knabb notes, the tragedy is not that councils were “utopian,” but that they were strangled before they could deepen.
This is what makes The Joy of Revolution compelling: it refuses both cynicism and romanticism. In its structure — “Some Facts of Life → Foreplay → Climaxes → Rebirth” — Knabb moves from critique, to history, to possibility. He shows how the ruling order not only represses, but also “diverts, absorbs, falsifies and spectacularizes.” He exposes the futility of terrorism, which “always ends up reinforcing the state.” He dissects how unions, parties, and media capture radical energies and turn them into managed opposition. And then, in “Rebirth,” he does what most radicals avoid: he sketches how a society without state and capital might actually function.
In “Rebirth,” Knabb faces the question that most radical writers prefer to avoid: how could a society without state and capital actually work? He refuses both the naïve optimism of utopians and the cynical silence of pure negation. Instead, he sketches a series of examples — not blueprints, but illustrations meant to show that the idea is not absurd. He stresses that these are provisional and hypothetical, and that it will be up to future people to experiment, empirically, with what actually works in each situation.
Importantly, Knabb does not present rigid oppositions. He does not counterpose spontaneity to organization, or decentralization to centralization, as if one were absolutely good and the other absolutely bad. He shows, rather, that such tensions must be navigated in practice: that organization need not mean hierarchy, that coordination can exist without domination, that spontaneity can flourish without falling into spectacle. His contribution is not to set up ideals in binary contrast, but to restore clarity about the stakes of each choice, and to draw on historical moments — councils, assemblies, uprisings — where people demonstrated that these balances could, for a time, be realized.
He emphasizes rotating, revocable delegates — not representatives. Their proceedings would be public, their mandates strictly defined, their positions temporary. He imagines the abolition of money: without the opacity of accumulation, abuses would be marginal and visible. He envisions communities diverse in style: some austere, others festive; cities transformed into workshops, libraries, and gardens. Above all, he insists on transforming work into play. Automation could reduce drudgery; the end of profit could liberate creativity.
These examples are not recipes. They are proofs of possibility. Knabb’s task is not to dictate, but to break the spell of impossibility.
And in this sense, Knabb succeeds. He gives back imagination. He restores confidence that another society is not only desirable but conceivable. Where Hakim Bey delivered temporary festivals, Knabb delivers clarity. Where communes offered escapism, Knabb insists on history: councils, mandates, revocability. Where academic theory spun in circles of jargon, Knabb speaks directly. He is, in this way, a rare voice of lucidity.
But clarity is not enough. And this is where the question of continuation arises.
Knabb wrote in the late twentieth century, when the main enemies were still visible: states, parties, unions, media conglomerates. His examples aimed at those apparatuses. But since the 1990s, power has mutated. Today, domination does not rely only on police or parliaments. It operates as perceptual architecture. It works through algorithms that modulate attention; through dopamine-driven feedback loops embedded in social media; through gamified labor platforms that turn work into micro-rewards and endless tracking. It is not simply the state that rules, but the interface.
In such a context, Knabb’s gesture — to show that councils, delegates, moneyless economies are possible — remains important, but insufficient. Because while we imagine, the present is already colonized. While we draw sketches of future societies, platforms are shaping desires, rhythms, and behaviors in real time.
This is why the step beyond Knabb is not a rejection but a continuation. He gave us the imaginable. Today we need the functioning. The task is not to proclaim visible alternative zones — which the system can absorb — but to generate invisible architectures that already operate. Not utopian communes with names and banners, but micro-ecologies that remain below the threshold of capture. Not spectacular “autonomous spaces,” but quiet, modular, unmarked practices that orient behavior without fanfare.
Here the question of time becomes crucial. Knabb’s structure is still linear: crisis → insurrection → rebirth. The continuation requires a different temporality: not waiting for “day X,” but exploiting cycles, compressing sequences, seizing windows of opportunity, creating accumulations that cannot be undone. The revolution is not an event; it is a series of irreversible shifts.
Seen in this light, the contrast becomes clear. Hakim Bey’s TAZ: recuperated. Squatted centers: recuperated. Communes: recuperated. Knabb: not recuperated, because he never claimed to offer blueprints or separatist utopias. He offered clarity, criteria, and reminders of real history. His gift was to destroy fatalism. To make the impossible thinkable again.
The faithful way to continue his work today is not to turn him into another dogma, nor to reject him as naïve. It is to take his invitation seriously. He never promised definitive forms; he offered examples, knowing that future generations would have to experiment and decide empirically. We are those people. Our context is different. The forms of power are different. To be faithful to Knabb is to experiment, here and now, in ways he could not have foreseen: with architectures of influence, with perceptual ecologies, with temporal strategies.
Knabb gave us the imaginable. Our task is to make it functioning. Not tomorrow, not after the event, but now. Not in visible “zones” that can be recuperated, but in subtle infrastructures that the system cannot capture. Not by proclaiming autonomy, but by living it in forms too precise to be named.
This is not a correction of Knabb, but the most respectful continuation. He broke the alibi of impossibility. To honor that gesture, we must break the alibi of delay. From imaginable to functioning, from possible to inevitable.
Knabb and the Threshold of Visibility
Ken Knabb has always walked a delicate line. He never sought approval from the system; he wanted nothing to do with the academic spectacle or the culture industry. Yet he also never accepted being ignored. His texts are meant to circulate, to provoke, to resonate. He speaks plainly because he does not want to hide; he refuses jargon because he wants to be read; he insists on clarity because he wants to be understood.
This is not vanity. It is fidelity to his conviction that a radical movement must be “an open conspiracy”: forthright, accessible, transparent. For Knabb, invisibility is dangerous — not because it cannot resist, but because it can become isolation, elitism, or mere secrecy. He prefers to stay in the open, in full view, but without bending to the spectacle. His wager is that words themselves, when stripped of mystification, can ignite.
The limitation of this wager is that it remains bound to visibility. Knabb seeks to cut through noise, to be read outside the system of approval, but still within the field of public speech. His revolution is clear, honest, and unspectacular — but still fundamentally visible.
There is, however, another path. A path where effectiveness does not depend on being read, circulated, or even noticed. Where the question is not how to speak in public without recuperation, but how to act beneath the threshold where recuperation even begins. Where architectures operate without names, patterns spread without recognition, and inevitability is generated without approval.
Knabb sought a revolution that would be seen without being spectacular. The continuation is a revolution that does not need to be seen at all.
Dialectic Without Exit
One of Knabb’s distinctive strengths is his refusal of manicheism. He never presents the spectacle as pure evil, nor activity as pure good. In his Rapid Responses he insists that things are never “absolutely distinct.” He mocks the fantasy of pure antagonisms: the subject wholly resistant, the system wholly oppressive. Life is messier, more contradictory. Even passivity, he stresses, is not inherently bad, and even resistance is never absolute. Debord’s sharp categories were rhetorical tools to cut through fog, not philosophical absolutes.
This fidelity to dialectic gives Knabb’s writing its enduring sobriety. He does not idolize terms; he insists on their relativity to context. He speaks of resistance and recuperation, activity and drift, transparency and spectacle, but always in gradients, never in absolutes. His honesty lies in acknowledging the complexity, in resisting the comfort of dualistic dogma.
And yet, this very dialectic remains tied to the visible field. His oppositions, however nuanced, presuppose that the decisive line still lies in whether people act consciously or drift passively, whether tactics remain forthright or fall into spectacle. These distinctions were incisive in the twentieth century, when media and centralized power were the primary terrain. But they falter in a world where power no longer waits for consciousness, where perception itself is pre-shaped by algorithms and behavioral loops. Here, the dialectic of active/passive no longer captures the stakes.
Knabb’s strength is to dissolve absolutes into complexity. His limit is to remain within a frame where complexity still unfolds under visibility. The continuation lies elsewhere: in architectures that function before awareness, beneath spectacle, irrecoverable by design. His dialectic breaks dogma; the next step is to break the very frame in which dialectic operates.
Knabb ended impossibility. We must end visibility itself.
VAN NHX
August 2025
The above text was posted online by Van Nhx — at his Facebook page and at the “Smygo” anarchist Facebook group, among other places. I have had some email correspondence with him over the last several years, and under a different name (Van Thuan Nguyen) he has translated several of my writings into Italian. He can be contacted via his “Van Nhx” Facebook page.
I appreciate Van’s very complimentary remarks about me in the first part of the piece. I must confess, however, that I am somewhat unclear about what he’s getting at in the later part of the piece.
Since the 1990s, power has mutated. Today, domination does not rely only on police or parliaments. It operates as perceptual architecture. It works through algorithms that modulate attention . . . . It is not simply the state that rules, but the interface.
That is certainly true enough, and well expressed. I think that anyone who has been paying attention to developments in the last three decades would agree. Nor would it have surprised the situationists, who were already talking about “new forms of conditioning” and experimenting with methods to counteract them way back in the 1950s.
But Van seems to imply that because the system’s structures of domination have become more subtle and less visible, any effective opposition to that system must be totally invisible. As if any visible radical action is automatically defeated or co-opted.
Today we need the functioning. The task is not to proclaim visible alternative zones — which the system can absorb — but to generate invisible architectures that already operate . . . micro-ecologies that remain below the threshold of capture . . . quiet, modular, unmarked practices that orient behavior without fanfare.
That all sounds very intriguing, but what it might involve seems unclear. The emphasis on “functioning” at first almost sounds like the same sorts of things that Van criticizes elsewhere in his text (and that he praises me for criticizing) — namely, people imagining that they can create some sort of significant change within the present system, some sort of different way of life that remains quietly under the radar because it avoids open antagonism. Kenneth Rexroth, for example, believed that certain types of poems or songs “involve and present a pattern of human relationships which is unassimilable by the society,” and he envisioned changing society “by infection, infiltration, diffusion and imperceptibly, microscopically, through the social organism, like the invisible pellets of a disease called Health.” I don’t think that’s exactly what Van is talking about. But if not, just what does he mean?
Our context is different. The forms of power are different. To be faithful to Knabb is to experiment, here and now, in ways he could not have foreseen: with architectures of influence, with perceptual ecologies, with temporal strategies. . . . Not in visible “zones” that can be recuperated, but in subtle infrastructures that the system cannot capture. Not by proclaiming autonomy, but by living it in forms too precise to be named.
If he is talking about living various kinds of positive human experiences or relationships in quiet, under-the-radar ways, there’s nothing very new or original about that. Countless people, radical or not, strive to do that all the time. Which in no way prevents them from also doing things that are both visible and meaningful.
Knabb sought a revolution that would be seen without being spectacular. The continuation is a revolution that does not need to be seen at all.
Nothing would please me more than for new generations of people to “go beyond” my ideas and practices and come up with more effective ones. But although I can imagine various maneuvers that might subtly alter people’s habits or mindsets, it seems to me that if such maneuvers have no visible social consequences, they can hardly be said to be revolutionary in any meaningful sense of the term.
But maybe that’s just my (generational?) blindspot. In any case, I thank Van for his vivid and provocative article. Perhaps other readers can figure out what he’s getting at better than I can.
KEN KNABB
September 2025
Van Nhx’s “Beyond Ken Knabb” (August 2025) followed by Ken Knabb’s response (September 2025).
Praises, Polemics, and Clarifications:
Selected Opinions about Ken Knabb (1975-1996)
Selected Opinions about Ken Knabb (1997-2005)
Selected Opinions about Ken Knabb
(2006-present)
Ken
Knabb, the Situationist International, and the American Counterculture (Jean-Pierre Depétris,
2008)
Beyond Ken Knabb (Van Nhx, 2025)
Rapid Responses (1999-present)