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Title: Immediatism Author: Hakim Bey Date: 1994 Language: en Topics: art, chaos, immediatism, mediation, Peter Lamborn Wilson, ontology, taz, silence, representation Source: ISBN 1 873176 42 2. Notes: First published as *Radio Sermonettes* (Libertarian Book Club, New York, 1992) and republished with a new preface in 1994 by AK Press.
Since absolutely nothing can be predicated with any real certainty as to
the “true nature of things”, all projects (as Nietzsche says) can only
be “founded on nothing.” And yet there must be a project—if only because
we ourselves resist being categorized as “nothing.” Out of nothing we
will make something: the Uprising, the revolt against everything which
proclaims: “The Nature of Things is such-&-such.” We disagree, we are
unnatural, we are less than nothing in the eyes of the Law—Divine Law,
Natural Law, or Social Law—take your pick. Out of nothing we will
imagine our values, and by this act of invention we shall live.
As we mediate on the nothing we notice that although it cannot be
de-fined, nevertheless paradoxically we can say something about it (even
if only metaphorically):—it appears to be a “chaos.” Both as ancient
myth and as “new science”, chaos lies at the heart of our project. The
great serpent (Tiamat, Python, Leviathan), Hesiod’s primal Chaos,
presides over the vast long dreaming of the Paleolithic—before all
kings, priests, agents of Order, History, Hierarchy, Law. “Nothing”
begins to take on a face—the smooth, featureless egg- or gourd-visage of
Mr. Hun-Tun, chaos-as-becoming, chaos-as-excess, the generous outpouring
of nothing into something.
In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all riot of color, all protoplasmic
urgency, all movement—is chaos. From this point of view, Order appears
as death, cessation, crystallization, alien silence.
Anarchists have been claiming for years that “anarchy is not chaos.”
Even anarchism seems to want a natural law, an inner and innate morality
in matter, an entelechy or purpose-of-being. (No better than Christians
in this respect, or so Nietzsche believed—radical only in the depth of
their resentment.) Anarchism says that “the state should be abolished”
only to institute a new more radical form of order in its place.
Ontological Anarchy however replies that no “state” can “exist” in
chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of
chaos (which however is undetermined), and therefore that governance of
any sort is impossible. “Chaos never died.” Any form of “order” which we
have not imagined and produced directly and spontaneously in sheer
“existential freedom” for our own celebratory purposes—is an illusion.
Of course, illusions can kill. Images of punishment haunt the sleep of
Order. Ontological Anarchy proposes that we wake up, and create our own
day—even in the shadow of the State, that pustulant giant who sleeps,
and whose dreams of Order metastatize as spasms of spectacular violence.
The only force significant enough to facilitate our act of creation
seems to be desire, or as Charles Fourier called it, “Passion.” Just as
Chaos and Eros (along with Earth and Old Night) are Hesiod’s first
deities, so too no human endeavor occurs outside their cosmogeneous
circle of attraction.
The logic of Passion leads to the conclusion that all “states” are
impossible, all “orders” illusory, except those of desire. No being,
only becoming—hence the only viable government is that of love, or
“attraction.” Civilization merely hides from itself—behind a thin static
scrim of rationality—the truth that only desire creates values. And so
the values of Civilization are based on the denial of desire.
Capitalism, which claims to produce Order by means of the reproduction
of desire, in fact originates in the production of scarcity, and only
reproduce itself in unfulfillment, negation, and alienation. As the
Spectacle disintegrates (like a malfunctioning VR program) it reveals
the fleshless bones of the Commodity. Like those tranced travelers in
Irish fairy tales who visit the Otherworld and seem to dine on
supernatural delicacies, we wake in a bleary dawn with ashes in our
mouths.
Individual vs. Group—Self vs. Other—a false dichotomy propagated through
the Media of Control, and above all through language. Hermes—the
Angel—the medium is the Messenger. All forms of communicativeness should
be angelic—language itself should be angelic—a kind of divine chaos.
Instead it is infected with a self-replicating virus, an infinite
crystal of separation, the grammar which prevents us from killing
Nobodaddy once and for all.
Self and Other complement and complete one another. There is no Absolute
Category, no Ego, no Society—but only a chaotically complex web of
relation—and the “Strange Attractior”, attraction itself, which evokes
resonances and patterns in the flow of becoming.
Values arise from this turbulence, values which are based on abundance
rather than scarcity, the gift rather than the commodity, and on the
synergistic and mutual enhancement of individual and group;—values which
are in every way the opposite of the morality and ethics of
Civilization, because they have to do with life rather than death.
“Freedom is a psycho-kinetic skill”—not an abstract noun. A process, not
a “state”—a movement, not a form of governance. The Land of the Dead
knows that perfect Order from which the organic and animate shrink in
horror—which explains why the Civilization of Slippage is more than half
in love with easeful death. From Babylon and Egypt to the 20th Century,
the architecture of Power can never quite be distinguished from the
tumuli of the necropolis.
Nomadism, and the Uprising, provide us with possible models for an
“everyday life” of Ontological Anarchy. The crystalline perfections of
Civilization and Revolution cease to interest us when we have
experienced them both as forms of War, variations on that tired old
Babylonian Con, the myth of Scarcity. Like the bedouin we choose an
architecture of skins—and an earth full of places of disappearance. Like
the Commune, we choose a liquid space of celebration and risk rather
than the icy waste of the Prism (or Prison) of Work, the economy of Lost
Time, the rictus of nostalgia for a synthetic future.
A utopian poetics helps us to know our desires. The mirror of Utopia
provides us with a kind of critical theory which no mere practical
politics nor systematic philosophy can hope to evolve. But we have no
time for theory which merely limits itself to the contemplation of
utopia as “no-place place” while bewailing the “impossibility of
desire.” The penetration of everyday life by the marvelous—the creation
of “situations”—belongs to the “material bodily principle”, and to the
imagination, and to the living fabric of the present.
The individual who realizes this immediacy can widen the circle of
pleasure to some extent, simply by waking from the hypnosis of the
“Spooks” (as Stirner called all abstractions); and yet more can be
accomplished by “crime”; and still more by the doubling of the Self in
sexuality. From Stirner’s “Union of Self-Owning Ones” we proceed to
Nietzsche’s circle of “Free Spirits” and thence to Fourier’s “Passional
Series”, doubling and redoubling ourselves even as the Other multiplies
itself in the eros of the group.
The activity of such a group will come to replace Art as we poor PoMo
bastards know it. Gratuitous creativity, or “play”, and the exchange of
gifts, will cause the withering-away of Art as the reproduction of
commodities. “Dada epistemology” will meltingly erase all separation,
and give rebirth to a psychic paleolithism in which life and beauty can
no longer be distinguished. Art in this sense has always been
camouflaged and repressed throughout the whole of High History, but has
never entirely vanished from our lives. One favourite example:—the
quilting bee—a spontaneous patterning carried out by a non-hierarchic
creative collective to produce a unique and useful and beautiful object,
typically as a gift for someone connected to the circle.
The task of Immediatist organization can be summed up as the widening of
the circle. The greater the portion of my life that can be wrenched from
the Work/Consume/Die cycle, and (re)turned over to the economy of the
“bee”, the greater my chance for pleasure. One runs a certain risk in
thus thwarting the vampiric energies of institutions. But risk itself
makes up part of the direct experience of pleasure, a fact noted in all
insurrectionary moments—all moments of making-up—of intense adventurous
enjoyments:—the festal aspect of the Uprising, the insurrectionary
nature of the Festival.
But between the lonely awakening of the individual, and the synergetic
anamnesis of the insurrectionary collectivity, there stretches out a
whole spectrum of social forms with some potential for our “project”.
Some last no longer than a chance meeting between two kindred spirits
who might enlarge each other by their brief and mysterious encounter;
others are like holidays, still other like pirate utopias. None seems to
last very long—but so what? Religions and States boasts of their
permanence—which, we know, is just jive…; what they mean is death.
We do not require “Revolutionary” institutions. “After the Revolution”
we would still continue to drift, to evade the instant sclerosis of a
politics of revenge, and instead seek out the excessive, the
strange—which for us has became the sole possible norm. If we join or
support certain “revolutionary” movements now, we’d certainly be the
first to “betray” them if they “came to power”. Power, after all, is for
us—not some fucking vanguard party.
In The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Autonomedia, NY, 1991) there was a
discussion of “the will to power as disappearance”, emphasizing the
evasive nature and ambiguity of the moment of “freedom”. In the present
series of texts (originally presented as Radio Sermonettes on an FM
station in New York, and published under that title by the anarchist
Libertarian Book Club), the focus shifts to the idea of a praxis of
re-appearance, and thus to the problem of organization. An attempt at a
theory of the aesthetics of the group—rather than a sociology or
politique—has been expressed here as a game for free spirits, rather
than as a blueprint for an institution. The group as medium, or as
mechanism of alienation, has been replaced by the Immediatist group,
devoted to the overcoming of separation. This book might be called a
thought-experiment on festal sodality—it has no higher ambitions. Above
all, it does not pretend to know “what must be done”—the delusion of
would-be commissars and gurus. It wants no disciples—it would prefer to
be burned—immolation not emulation! In fact it has almost no interest in
“dialogue” at all, and would prefer rather to attract co-conspirators
than readers. It loves to talk, but only because talk is a kind of
celebration rather than a kind of work.
And only intoxication stands between this book—and silence.
— Hakim Bey
(Vernal Equinox 1993)
All experience is mediated—by the mechanisms of sense perception,
mentation, language, etc.—& certainly all art consists of some further
mediation of experience.
However, mediation takes place by degrees. Some experiences (smell,
taste, sexual pleasure, etc.) are less mediated than others (reading a
book, looking through a telescope, listening to a record). Some media,
especially “live” arts such as dance, theater, musical or bardic
performance, are less mediated than others such as TV, CDs, Virtual
Reality. Even among the media usually called “media,” some are more &
others are less mediated, according to the intensity of imaginative
participation they demand. Print & radio demand more of the imagination,
film less, TV even less, VR the least of all—so far.
For art, the intervention of Capital always signals a further degree of
mediation. To say that art is commodified is to say that a mediation, or
standing-inbetween, has occurred, & that this betweenness amounts to a
split, & that this split amounts to “alienation.” Improv music played by
friends at home is less “alienated” than music played “live” at the Met,
or music played through media (whether PBS or MTV or Walkman). In fact,
an argument could be made that music distributed free or at cost on
cassette via mail is LESS alienated than live music played at some huge
We Are The World spectacle or Las Vegas niteclub, even though the latter
is live music played to a live audience (or at least so it appears),
while the former is recorded music consumed by distant & even anonymous
listeners.
The tendency of Hi Tech, & the tendency of Late Capitalism, both impel
the arts farther & farther into extreme forms of mediation. Both widen
the gulf between the production & consumption of art, with a
corresponding increase in “alienation.”
With the disappearance of a “mainstream” & therefore of an “avant-garde”
in the arts, it has been noticed that all the more advanced & intense
art-experiences have been recuperable almost instantly by the media, &
thus are rendered into trash like all other trash in the ghostly world
of commodities. “Trash,” as the term was redefined in, let’s say,
Baltimore in the 1970s, can be good fun—as an ironic take on a sort of
inadvertent folkultur that surrounds & pervades the more unconscious
regions of “popular” sensibility—which in turn is produced in part by
the Spectacle. “Trash” was once a fresh concept, with radical potential.
By now, however, amidst the ruins of Post-Modernism, it has finally
begun to stink. Ironic frivolity finally becomes disgusting. Is it
possible now to BE SERIOUS BUT NOT SOBER? (Note: The New Sobriety is of
course simply the flipside of the New Frivolity. Chic neo-puritanism
carries the taint of Reaction, in just the same way that postmodernist
philosophical irony & despair lead to Reaction. The Purge Society is the
same as the Binge Society. After the “12 steps” of trendy renunciation
in the ’90s, all that remains is the 13th step of the gallows. Irony may
have become boring, but self-mutilation was never more than an abyss.
Down with frivolity—Down with sobriety.)
Everything delicate & beautiful, from Surrealism to Break-dancing, ends
up as fodder for McDeath’s ads; 15 minutes later all the magic has been
sucked out, & the art itself dead as dried locust. The media-wizards,
who are nothing if not postmodernists, have even begun to feed on the
vitality of “Trash,” like vultures regurgitating & re-consuming the same
carrion, in an obscene ecstasy of self-referentiality. Which way to the
Egress?
Real art is play, & play is one of the most immediate of all
experiences. Those who have cultivated the pleasure of play cannot be
expected to give it up simply to make a political point (as in an “Art
Strike,” or “the suppression without the realization” of art, etc.) Art
will go on, in somewhat the same sense that breathing, eating, or
fucking will go on.
Nevertheless, we are repelled by the extreme alienation of the arts,
especially in “the media,” in commercial publishing & galleries, in the
recording “industry,” etc. And we sometimes worry even about the extent
to which our very involvement in such arts as writing, painting, or
music implicates us in a nasty abstraction, a removal from immediate
experience. We miss the directness of play (our original kick in doing
art in the first place); we miss smell, taste, touch, the feel of bodies
in motion.
Computers, video, radio, printing presses, synthesizers, fax machines,
tape recorders, photocopiers—these things make good toys, but terrible
addictions. Finally we realize we cannot “reach out & touch someone” who
is present in the flesh. These media may be useful to our art—but they
must not possess us, nor must they stand between, mediate, or separate
us from our animal/animate selves. We want to control our media, not be
Controlled by them. And we should like to remember a certain psychic
martial art which stresses the realization that the body itself is the
least mediated of all media.
Therefore, as artists & “cultural workers” who have no intention of
giving up activity in our chosen media, we nevertheless demand of
ourselves an extreme awareness of immediacy, as well as the mastery of
some direct means of implementing this awareness as play, immediately
(at once) & immediately (without mediation).
Fully realizing that any art “manifesto” written today can only stink of
the same bitter irony it seeks to oppose, we nevertheless declare
without hesitation (without too much thought) the founding of a
“movement,” IMMEDIATISM. We feel free to do so because we intend to
practice Immediatism in secret, in order to avoid any contamination of
mediation. Publicly we’ll continue our work in publishing, radio,
printing, music, etc., but privately we will create something else,
something to be shared freely but never consumed passively, something
which can be discussed openly but never understood by the agents of
alienation, something with no commercial potential yet valuable beyond
price, something occult yet woven completely into the fabric of our
everyday lives.
Immediatism is not a movement in the sense of an aesthetic program. It
depends on situation, not style or content, message or School. It may
take the form of any kind of creative play which can be performed by two
or more people, by & for themselves, face-to-face & together. In this
sense it is like a game, & therefore certain “rules” may apply.
All spectators must also be performers. All expenses are to be shared, &
all products which may result from the play are also to be shared by the
participants only (who may keep them or bestow them as gifts, but should
not sell them). The best games will make little or no use of obvious
forms of mediation such as photography, recording, printing, etc., but
will tend toward immediate techniques involving physical presence,
direct communication, & the senses.
An obvious matrix for Immediatism is the party. Thus a good meal could
be an Immediatist art project, especially if everyone present cooked as
well as ate. Ancient Chinese & Japanese on misty autumn days would hold
odor parties, where each guest would bring a homemade incense or
perfume. At linked-verse parties a faulty couplet would entail the
penalty of a glass of wine. Quilting bees, tableaux vivants, exquisite
corpses, rituals of conviviality like Fourier’s “Museum Orgy” (erotic
costumes, poses, & skits), live music & dance—the past can be ransacked
for appropriate forms, & imagination will supply more.
The mail art of the ’70s & the zine scene of the ’80s were attempts to
go beyond the mediation of art-as-commodity, & may be considered
ancestors of Immediatism. However, they preserved the mediated
structures of postal communication & xerography, & thus failed to
overcome the isolation of the players, who remained quite literally out
of touch. We wish to take the motives & discoveries of these earlier
movements to their logical conclusion in an art which banishes all
mediation & alienation, at least to the extent that the human condition
allows.
Moreover, Immediatism is not condemned to powerlessness of the world,
simply because it avoids the publicity of the marketplace. “Poetic
Terrorism” & “Art Sabotage” are quite logical manifestations of
Immediatism.
Finally, we expect that the practice of Immediatism will release within
us vast storehouses of forgotten power, which will not only transform
our lives through the secret realization of unmediated play, but will
also inescapably well up & burst out & permeate the other art we create,
the more public & mediated art.
And we hope that the two will grow closer & closer, & eventually perhaps
become one.
The mandarins draw their power from the law;
the people from the secret societies.
(Chinese saying)
Last winter I read a book on the Chinese Tongs (Primitive
Revolutionaries of China: A Study of Secret Societies in the Late
Nineteenth Century, Fei-Ling Davis; Honolulu, 1971-77):—maybe the first
ever written by someone who wasn’t a British Secret Service agent!—(in
fact, she was a Chinise socialist who died young—this was her only
book)—& for the first time I realized why I’ve always been attracted to
the Tong: not just for the romanticism, the elegant decadent chinoiserie
decor, as it were—but also for the form, the structure, the very essence
of the thing.
Some time later in an excellent interview with William Burroughs in
Homocore magazine I discovered that he too has become fascinated with
Tongs & suggests the form as a perfect mode of organization for queers,
particulary in this present era of shitheel moralism & hysteria. I’d
agree, & extend the recommendation to all marginal groups, especially
ones whose jouissance involves illegalism (potheads, sex heretics,
insurrectionists) or extreme eccentricity (nudists, pagans,
post-avant-garde artists, etc., etc.).
A Tong can perhaps be defined as a mutual benefit society for people
with a common interest which is illegal or dangerously marginal—hence,
the necessary secrecy. Many Chinese Tongs revolved around smuggling &
tax-evasion, or clandestine self-control of certain trades (in
opposition to State control), or insurrectionary political or religious
aims (overthrow of the Manchus for example—several tongs collaborated
with the Anarchists in the 1911 Revolution).
A common purpose of the tongs was to collect & invest membership dues &
initiation fees in insurance funds for the indigent, unemployed, widows
& orphans of deceased members, funeral expenses, etc. In an era like
ours when the poor are caught between the cancerous Scylla of the
insurance industry & the fast-evaporating Charybdis of welfare & public
health services, this purpose of the Secret Society might well regain
its appeal. (Masonic lodges were organized on this basis, as were the
early & illegal trade unions & “chivalric orders” for laborers &
artisans.) Another universal purpose for such societies was of course
conviviality, especially banqueting—but even this apparently innocuous
pastime can acquire insurrectionary implications. In the various French
revolutions, for example, dining clubs frequently took on the role of
radical organizations when all other forms of public meeting were
banned.
Recently I talked about tongs with “P.M.,” author of bolo’bolo
(Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series). I argued that secret societies are
once again a valid possibility for groups seeking autonomy & individual
realization. He disagreed, but not (as I expected) because of the
“elitist” connotations of secrecy. He felt that such organizational
forms work best for already-close-knit groups with strong economic,
ethnic/regional, or religious ties—conditions which do not exist (or
exist only embryonically) in today’s marginal scene. He proposed instead
the establishment of multi-purpose neighborhood centers, with expenses
to be shared by various special-interest groups & small-entrepreneurial
concerns (craftspeople, coffeehouses, performance spaces, etc.). Such
large centers would require official status (State recognition), but
would obviously become foci for all sorts of non-official activity—black
markets, temporary organization for “protest” or insurrectionary action,
uncontrolled “leisure” & unmonitored conviviality, etc.
In response to “P.M.”’s critique I have not abandoned but rather
modified my concept of what a modern Tong might be. The intensely
hierarchical structure of the traditional tong would obviously not work,
although some of the forms could be saved & used in the same way titles
& honors are used in our “free religions” (or “weird” religions, “joke”
religions, anarcho-neo-pagan cults, etc.). Non-hierarchic organization
appeals to us, but so too does ritual, incense, the delightful bombast
of occult orders—“Tong Aesthetics” you might call it—so why shouldn’t we
have our cake & eat it too?—(especially if it’s Moroccan majoun or baba
au absinthe—something a bit forbidden!). Among other things, the Tong
should be a work of art.
The strict traditional rule of secrecy also needs modification. Nowadays
anything which evades the idiot gaze of publicity is already virtually
secret. Most modern people seem unable to believe in the reality of
something they never see on television—therefore to escape being
televisualized is already to be quasi-invisible. Moreover, that which is
seen through the mediation of the media becomes somehow unreal, & loses
its power (I won’t bother to defend this thesis but simply refer the
reader to a train of thought which leads from Nietzsche to Benjamin to
Bataille to Barthes to Foucault to Baudrillard). By contrast, perhaps
that which is unseen retains its reality, its rootedness in everyday
life & therefore in the possibility of the marvelous.
So the modern Tong cannot be elitist—but there’s no reason it can’t be
choosy. Many non-authoritarian organizations have foundered on the
dubious principle of open membership, which frequently leads to a
preponderance of assholes, yahoos, spoilers, whining neurotics, & police
agents. If a Tong is organized around a special interest (especially an
illegal or risky or marginal interest) it certainly has the right to
compose itself according to the “affinity group” principle. If secrecy
means (a) avoiding publicity & (b) vetting possible members, the “secret
society” can scarcely be accused of violating anarchist principles. In
fact, such societies have a long & honorable history in the
antiauthoritarian movement, from Proudhon’s dream of re-animating the
Holy Vehm as a kind of “People’s Justice,” to Bakunin’s various schemes,
to Durutti’s “Wanderers.” We ought not to allow marxist historians to
convince us that such expedients are “primitive” & have therefore been
left behind by “History.” The absoluteness of “History” is at best a
dubious proposition. We are not interested in a return to the primitive,
but in a return OF the primitive, inasmuch as the primitive is the
“repressed.”
In the old days secret societies would appear in times & spaces
forbidden by the State, i.e. where & when people are kept apart by law.
In our times people are usually not kept apart by law but by mediation &
alienation (see Part 1, “Immediatism”). Secrecy therefore becomes an
avoidance of mediation, while conviviality changes from a secondary to a
primary purpose of the “secret society.” Simply to meet together
face-to-face is already an action against the forces which oppress us by
isolation, by loneliness, by the trance of media.
In a society which enforces a schizoid split between Work & Leisure, we
have all experienced the trivialization of our “free time,” time which
is organized neither as work nor as leisure. (“Vacation” once meant
“empty” time—now it signifies time which is organized & filled by the
industry of leisure.) The “secret” purpose of conviviality in the secret
society then becomes the self-structuring & auto-valorization of free
time. Most parties are devoted only to loud music & too much booze, not
because we enjoy them but because the Empire of Work has imbued us with
the feeling that empty time is wasted time. The idea of throwing a party
to, say, make a quilt or sing madrigals together, seems hopelessly
outdated. But the modern Tong will find it both necessary & enjoyable to
seize back free time from the commodity world & devote it to shared
creation, to play.
I know of several societies organized along these lines already, but I’m
certainly not going to blow their secrecy by discussing them in print.
There are some people who do not need fifteen second on the Evening News
to validate their existence. Of course, the marginal press & radio
(probably the only media in which this sermonette will appear) are
practically invisible anyway—certainly still quite opaque to the gaze of
Control. Nevertheless, there’s the principle of the thing: secrets
should be respected. Not everyone needs to know everything! What the
20th century lacks most—& needs most—is tact. We wish to replace
democratic epistemology with “dada epistemology” (Feyerabend). Either
you’re on the bus or you’re not on the bus.
Some will call this an elitist attitude, but it is not—at least not in
the C. Wright Mills sense of the word: that is, a small group which
exercises power over non-insiders for its own aggrandizement.
Immediatism does not concern itself with power-relations;—It desires
neither to be ruled nor to rule. The contemporary Tong therefore finds
no pleasure in the degeneration of institutions into conspiracies. It
wants power for its own purposes of mutuality. It is a free association
of individuals who have chosen each other as subjects to the group’s
generosity, its “expansiveness” (to use a sufi term). If this amounts to
some kind of “elitism,” then so be it.
If Immediatism begins with groups of friends trying not just to overcome
isolation but also to enhance each other’s lives, soon it will want to
take a more complex shape:—nuclei of mutually-self-chosen allies,
working (playing) to occupy more & more time & space outside all
mediated structure & control. Then it will want to become a horizontal
network of such autonomous groups—then, a “tendency”—then, a
“movement”—then, a kinetic web of “temporary autonomous zones.” At last
it will strive to become the kernel of a new society, giving birth to
itself within the corrupt shell of the old. For all these purposes the
secret society promises to provide a useful framework of protective
clandestinity—a cloak of invisibility that will have to be dropped only
in the event of some final snowdown with the Babylon of Mediation…
Prepare for the Tong Wars!
Many monsters stand between us & the realization of Immediatist goals.
For instance our own ingrained unconscious alienation might all too
easily be mistaken for a virtue, especially when contrasted with
crypto-authoritarian pap passed off as “community,” or with various
upscale versions of “leisure.” Isn’t it natural to take the dandyism
noir of curmudgeonly hermits for some kind of heroic individualism, when
the only visible contrast is Club Med commodity socialism, or the
gemutlich masochism of the Victim Cults? To be doomed & cool naturally
appeals more to noble souls than to be saved & cozy.
Immediatism means to enhance individuals by providing a matrix of
friendship, not to belittle them by sacrificing their “ownness” to
group-think, leftist self-abnegation, or New Age clone-values. What must
be overcome is not individuality per se, but rather the addiction to
bitter loneliness which characterizes consciousness in the 20th century
(which is by & large not much more than a re-run of the 19th).
Far more dangerous than any inner monster of (what might be called)
“negative selfishness,” however, is the outward, very real & utterly
objective monster of too-Late Capitalism. The marxists (R.I.P.) had
their own version of how this worked, but here we are not concerned with
abstract/dialectical analyses of labor-value or class structure (even
though these may still require analysis, & even more so since the
“death” or “disappearance” of Communism). Instead we’d like to point out
specific tactical dangers facing any Immediatist project.
1. Capitalism only supports certain kinds of groups, the nuclear family
for example, or “the people I know at my job,” because such groups are
already self-alienated & hooked into the Work/Consume/Die structure.
Other kinds of groups may be allowed, but will lack all support from
societal structure, & thus find themselves facing grotesque challenges &
difficulties which appear under the guise of “bad luck.”
The first & most innocent-seeming obstacle to any Immediatist project
will be the “busyness” or “need to make a living” faced by each of its
associates. However there is no real innocence here—only our profound
ignorance of the ways in which Capitalism itself is organized to prevent
all genuine conviviality.
No sooner have a group of friends begun to visualize immediate goals
realizable only thru solidarity & cooperation, when suddenly one of them
will be offered a “good” job in Cincinnati or teaching English in
Taiwan—or else have to move back to California to care for a dying
parent—or else they’ll lose the “good” job they already have & be
reduced to a state of misery which precludes their very enjoyment of the
group’s project or goals (i.e. they’ll become “depressed”). At the most
mundane-seeming level, the group will fail to agree on a day of the week
for meetings because everyone is “busy.” But this is not mundane. It’s
sheer cosmic evil. We whip ourselves into froths of indignation over
“oppression” & “unjust laws” when in fact these abstractions have little
impact on our daily lives—while that which really makes us miserable
goes unnoticed, written off to “busyness” or “distraction” or even to
the nature of reality itself (“Well, I can’t live without a job”).
Yes, perhaps it’s true we can’t “live” without a job—although I hope
we’re grown-up enough to know the difference between life & the
accumulation of a bunch of fucking gadgets. Still. we must constantly
remind ourselves (since our culture won’t do it for us) that this
monster called WORK remains the precise & exact target of our rebellious
wrath, the one single most oppressive reality we face (& we must learn
also to recognize Work when it’s disguised as “leisure”).
To be “too busy” for the Immediatist project is to miss the very essence
of Immediatism. To struggle to come together every Monday night (or
whatever), in the teeth of the gale of busyness, or family, or
invitations to stupid parties—that struggle is already Immediatism
itself. Succeed in actually physically meeting face-to-face with a group
which is not your spouse-&-kids, or the “guys from my job,” or your
12-step Program—& you have already achieved virtually everything
Immediatism yearns for. An actual project will arise almost
spontaneously out of this successful slap-in-the-face of the social norm
of alienated boredom. Outwardly, of course, the project will seem to be
the group’s purpose, its motive for coming together—but in fact the
opposite is true. We’re not kidding or indulging in hyperbole when we
insist that meeting-face-to-face is arleady “the revolution.” Attain it
& the creativity part comes naturally; like “the kingdom of heaven” it
will be added unto you. Of course it will be horribly difficult—why else
would we have spent the last decade trying to construct our “bohemia in
the mail,” if it were easy to have it in some quartier latin or rural
commune? The rat-bastard Capitalist scum who are telling you to “reach
out & touch someone” with a telephone or “be there!” (where? alone in
front of a goddam television??)—these lovecrafty suckers are trying to
turn you into a scrunched-up blood-drained pathetic crippled little cog
in the death-machine of the human soul (& let’s not have any theological
quibbles about what we mean by “soul”!). Fight them—by meeting with
friends, not to consume or produce, but to enjoy friendship—& you will
have triumphed (at least for a moment) over the most pernicious
conspiracy in EuroAmerican society today—the conspiracy to turn you into
a living corpse galvanized by prosthesis & the terror of scarcity—to
turn you into a spook haunting your own brain. This is not a petty
matter! This is a question of failure or triumph!
2. If busyness & fissipation are the first potential failures of
Immediatism, we cannot say that its triumph should be equated with
“success.” The second major threat to our project can quite simply be
described as the tragic success of the project itself. Let’s say we’ve
overcome physical alienation & have actually met, developed our project,
& created something (a quilt, a banquet, a play, a bit of eco-sabotage,
etc.). Unless we keep it an absolute secret—which is probably impossible
& in any case would constitute a somewhat poisonous selfishness—other
people will hear of it (other people from hell, to paraphrase the
existentialists)— & among these other people, some will be agents
(conscious or unconscious, it doesn’t matter) of too-Late Capitalism.
The Spectacle—or whatever has replaced it since 1968—is above all empty.
It fuels itself by the constant Moloch-like gulping-down of everyone’s
creative powers & ideas. It’s more desperate for your “radical
subjectivity” than any vampire or cop for your blood. It wants your
creativity much more even than you want it yourself. It would die unless
you desired it, & you will only desire it if it seems to offer you the
very desires you dreamed, alone in your lonely genius, disguised & sold
back to you as commodities. Ah, the metaphysical shenanigans of objects!
(or words to that effect, Marx cited by Benjamin).
Suddenly it will appear to you (as if a demon had whispered it in your
ear) that the Immediatist art you’ve created is so good, so fresh, so
original, so strong compared to all the crap on the “market”—so
pure—that you could water it down & sell it, & make a living at it, so
you could all knock off WORK, buy a farm in the country, & do art
together for-ever after. And perhaps it’s true. You could…after all,
you’re geniuses. But it’d be better to fly to Hawaii & throw yourself
into a live volcano. Sure, you could have success; you could even have
15 seconds on the Evening News—or a PBS documentary made on your life.
Yes indeedy.
3. But this is where the last major monster steps in, crashes thru the
living room wall, & snuffs you (if Success itself hasn’t already
“spoiled” you, that is).
Because in order to succeed you must first be “seen.” And if you are
seen, you will be perceived as wrong, illegal, immoral—different. The
Spectacle’s main sources of creative energy are all in prison. If you’re
not a nuclear family or a guided tour or the Republican Party, then why
are you meeting every Monday evening? To do drugs? illicit sex? income
tax evasion? satanism?
And of course the chances are good that your Immediatist group is
engaged in something illegal—since almost everything enjoyable is in
fact illegal. Babylon hates it when anyone actually enjoys life, rather
than merely spends money in a vain attempt to buy the illusion of
enjoyment. Dissipation, gluttony, bulimic overconsumption—these are not
only legal but mandatory. If you don’t waste yourself on the emptiness
of commodities you are obviously queer & must by definition be breaking
some law. True pleasure in this society is more dangerous than bank
robbery. At least bank robbers share Massa’s respect for Massa’s money.
But you, you perverts, clearly deserve to be burned at the stake—& here
come the peasants with their torches, eager to do the State’s bidding
without even being asked. Now you are the monsters, & your little gothic
castle of Immediatism is engulfed in flames. Suddenly cops are swarming
out of the woodwork. Are your papers in order? Do you have a permit to
exist?
Immediatism is a picnic—but it’s not easy. Immediatism is the most
natural path for free humans imaginable—& therefore the most unnatural
abomination in the eyes of Capital. Immediatism will triumph, but only
at the cost of self-organization of power, of clandestinity, & of
insurrection. Immediatism is our delight, Immediatism is dangerous.
So far we’ve treated Immediatism as an aesthetic movement rather than a
political one—but if the “personal is political” then certainly the
aesthetic must be considered even more so. “Art for art’s sake” cannot
really be said to exist at all, unless it be taken to imply that art per
se functions as political power, i.e. power capable of expressing or
even changing the world rather than merely describing it.
In fact art always seeks such power, whether the artist remains
unconscious of the fact & believes in “pure” aesthetics, or becomes so
hyper-conscious of the fact as to produce nothing but agit-prop.
Consciousness in itself, as Nietzsche pointed out, plays a less
significant role in life than power. No snappier proof of this could be
imagined than the continued existence of an “Art World” (SoHo, 57th St.,
etc.) which still believes in the separate realms of political art &
aesthetic art. Such failure of consciousness allows this “world” the
luxury of producing art with overt political content (to satisfy their
liberal customers) as well as art without such content, which merely
expresses the power of the bourgeois scum & bankers who buy it for their
investment portfolios.
If art did not possess & wield this power it would not be worth doing &
nobody would do it. Literal art for art’s sake would produce nothing but
impotence & nullity. Even the fin-de-siécle decadents who invented l’art
pour l’art used it politically:—as a weapon against bourgeois values of
“utility,” “morality” & so on. The idea that art can be voided of
political meaning appeals now only to those liberal cretins who wish to
excuse “pornography” or other forbidden aesthetic games on the grounds
that “it’s only art” & hence can change nothing. (I hate these assholes
worse than Jesse Helms; at least he still believes that art has power!)
Even if an art without political content can—for the moment—be admitted
to exist (altho this remains exceedingly problematic), then the
political meaning of art can still be sought in the means of its
production & consumption. The art of 57th St. remains bourgeois no
matter how radical its content may appear, as Warhol proved by painting
Che Guevara; in fact Valerie Solanis revealed herself far more radical
than Warhol—by shooting him—(& perhaps even more radical than Che, that
Rudolf Valentino of Red Fascism).
In fact we’re not terribly concerned with the content of Immediatist
art. Immediatism remains for us more game than “movement”; as such, the
game might result in Brechtian didacticism or Poetic Terrorism, but it
might equally well leave behind no content at all (as in a banquet), or
else one with no obvious political message (such as a quilt). The
radical quality of Immediatism expresses itself rather in its mode of
production & consumption.
That is, it is produced by a group of friends either for itself alone or
for a larger circle of friends; it is not produced for sale, nor is it
sold, nor (ideally) is it allowed to slip out of the control of its
producers in any way. If it is meant for consumption outside the circle
then it must be made in such a way as to remain impervious to cooptation
& commodification. For example, if one of our quilts escaped us & ended
up sold as “art” to some capitalist or museum, we should consider it a
disaster. Quilts must remain in our hands or be given to those who will
appreciate them & keep them. As for our agitprop, it must resist
commodification by its very form;—we don’t want our posters sold twenty
years later as “art,” like Myakovsky (or Brecht, for that matter). The
best Immediatist agitprop will leave no trace at all, except in the
souls of those who are changed by it.
Let us repeat here that participation in Immediatism does not preclude
the production/consumption of art in other ways by the individuals
making up the group. We are not ideologues, & this is not Jonestown.
This is a game, not a movement; it has rules of play, but no laws.
Immediatism would love it if everyone were an artist, but our goal is
not mass conversion. The game’s payoff lies in its ability to escape the
paradoxes & contradictions of the commercial art world (including
literature, etc.), in which all liberatory gestures seem to end up as
mere representations & hence betrayals of themselves. We offer the
chance for art which is immediately present by virtue of the fact that
it can exist only in our presence. Some of us may still write novels or
paint pictures, either to “make a living” or to seek out ways to redeem
these forms from recuperation. But Immediatism sidesteps both these
problems. Thus it is “privileged,” like all games.
But we cannot for this reason alone call it involuted, turned in on
itself, closed, hermetic, elitist, art for art’s sake. In Immediatism
art is produced & consumed in a certain way, & this modus operandi is
already “political” in a very specific sense. In order to grasp this
sense, however, we must first explore “involution” more closely.
It’s become a truism to say that society no longer expresses a consensus
(whether reactionary or liberatory), but that a false consensus is
expressed for society; let’s call this false consensus “the Totality.”
The Totality is produced thru mediation & alienation, which attempt to
subsume or absorb all creative energies for the Totality. Myakovsky
killed himself when he realized this; perhaps we’re made of sterner
stuff, perhaps not. But for the sake of argument, let us assume that
suicide is not a “solution.”
The Totality isolates individuals & renders them powerless by offering
only illusory modes of social expression, modes which seem to promise
liberation or self-fulfillment but in fact end by producing yet more
mediation & alienation. This complex can be viewed clearly at the level
of “commodity fetishism,” in which the most rebellious or avant-garde
forms in art can be turned into fodder for PBS or MTV or ads for jeans
or perfume.
On a subtler level, however, the Totality can absorb & re-direct any
power whatsoever simply by re-contextualizing & re-presenting it. For
instance, the liberatory power of a painting can be neutralized or even
absorbed simply by placing it in the context of a gallery or museum,
where it will automatically become a mere representation of liberatory
power. The insurrectionary gesture of a madman or criminal is not
negated only by locking up the perpetrator, but even more by allowing
the gesture to be represented—by a psychiatrist or by some brainless
Kopshow on channel 5 or even by a coffee-table book on Art Brut. This
has been called “Spectacular recuperation”; however, the Totality can go
even farther than this simply by simulating that which it formerly
sought to recuperate. That is, the artist & madman are no longer
necessary even as sources of appropriation or “mechanical reproduction,”
as Benjamin called it. Simulation cannot reproduce the faint reflection
of “aura” which Benjamin allowed even to commodity-trash, its “utopian
trace.” Simulation cannot in fact reproduce or produce anything except
desolation & misery. But since the Totality thrives on our misery,
simulation suits its purpose quite admirably.
All these effects can be tracked most obviously & crudely in the area
generally called “the Media” (altho we contend that mediation has a much
wider range than even the term broad-cast could ever describe or
indicate). The role of the Media in the recent Nintendo War—in fact the
Media’s one-to-one identification with that war—provides a perfect &
exemplary scenario. All over America millions of people possessed at
least enough “enlightenment” to condemn this hideous parody of morality
enforced by that murderous crack-dealing spy in the White House. The
Media however produced (i.e. simulated) the impression that virtually no
opposition to Bush’s war existed or could exist; that (to quote Bush)
“there is no Peace Movement.” And in fact there was no Peace
Movement—only millions of people whose desire for peace had been negated
by the Totality, wiped out, “disappeared” like victims of Peruvian death
squads; people separated from each other by the brutal alienation of TV,
news management, infotainment & sheer disinformation; people made to
feel isolated alienated, weird, queer, wrong, finally non-existent;
people without voices; people without power.
This process of fragmentation has reached near-universal completion in
our society, at least in the area of social discourse. Each person
engages in a “relation of involution” with the spectacular simulation of
Media. That is, our “relation” with Media is essentially empty &
illusory, so that even when we seem to reach out & perceive reality in
Media, we are in fact merely driven back in upon ourselves, alienated,
isolated, & impotent. America is full to overflowing with people who
feel that no matter what they say or do, no difference will be made;
that no one is listening; that there is no one to listen. This feeling
is the triumph of the Media. “They” speak, you listen—& therefore turn
in upon yourself in a spiral of loneliness, distraction, depression, &
spiritual death.
This process affects not only individuals but also such groups as still
exist outside the Consensus Matrix of nuke-family, school, church, job,
army, political party, etc. Each group of artists or peace activists or
whatever is also made to feel that no contact with other groups is
possible. Each “life-style” group buys the simulation of rivalry &
enmity with other such groups of consumers. Each class & race is assured
of its ungulfable existential alienation from all other classes & races
(as in Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous).
The concept of “networking” began as a revolutionary strategy to bypass
& overcome the Totality by setting up horizontal connections (unmediated
by authority) among individuals & group. In the 1980s we discovered that
networking could also be mediated & in fact had to be mediated—by
telephone, computers, the post office, etc.—& thus was doomed to fail us
in our struggle against alienation. Communication technology may still
prove to offer useful tools in this struggle, but by now it has become
clear that CommTech is not a goal in itself. And in fact our distrust of
seemingly “democratic” tech like PCs & phones increases with every
revolutionary failure to hold control of the means of production.
Frankly we do not wish to be forced to make up our minds whether or not
any new tech will be or must be either liberatory or counter-liberatory.
“After the revolution” such questions would answer themselves in the
context of a “politics of desire.” For the time being, however, we have
discovered (not invented) Immediatism as a means of direct production &
presentation of creative, liberatory & ludic energies, carried out
without recourse to mediation of any mechanistic or alienated structures
whatsoever…or at least so we hope.
In other words, whether or not any given technology or form of mediation
can be used to overcome the Totality, we have decided to play a game
that uses no such tech & hence does not need to question it—at least,
not within the borders of the game. We reserve our challenge, our
question, for the total Totality, not for anyone “issue” with which it
seeks to distract us.
And this brings us back to the “political form” of Immediatism.
Face-to-face, body-to-body, breath-to-breath (literally a
conspiracy)—the game of Immediatism simply cannot be played on any level
accessible to the false Consensus. It does not represent “everyday
life”—it cannot BE other than everyday life, although it positions
itself for the penetration of the marvelous, for the illumination of the
real by the wonderful. Like a secret society, the networking it does
must be slow (infinitely more slow than the “pure speed” of CommTech,
media & war), & it must be corporeal rather than abstract, fleshless,
mediated by machine or by authority or by simulation.
In this sense we say that Immediatism is a picnic (a conviviality) but
is not easy—that it is most natural for free spirits but that it is
dangerous. Content has nothing to do with it. The sheer existence of
Immediatism is already an insurrection.
There is a time for the theatre.—If people’s imagination grows weak
there arises in it the inclination to have its legends presented to it
on the stage: it can now endure these crude substitutes for imagination.
But those ages to which the epic rhapsodist belongs, the theatre and the
actor disguised as a hero is a hindrance to imagination rather than a
means of giving it wings: too close, too definite, too heavy, too little
in it of dream and bird-flight.
— Nietzsche
But of course the rhapsodist, who here appears only one step removed
from the shaman (“…dream and bird-flight”) must also be called a kind of
medium or bridge standing between “a people” and its imagination. (Note:
we’ll use the word “imagination” sometimes in Wm. Blake’s sense &
sometimes in Gaston Bachelard’s sense without opting for either a
“spiritual” or an “aesthetic” determination, & without recourse to
metaphysics.) A bridge carries across (“translate,” “metaphor”) but is
not the original. And to translate is to betray. Even the rhapsodist
provides a little poison for the imagination.
Ethnography, however, allows us to assert the possibility of societies
where shamans are not specialists of the imagination, but where everyone
is a special sort of shaman. In these societies, all members (except the
psychically handicapped) act as shamans & bards for themselves as well
as for their people. For example: certain Amerindian tribes of the Great
Plains developed the most complex of all hunter/gatherer societies quite
late in their history (perhaps partly in thanks to the gun & horse,
technologies adopted from European culture). Each person acquired
complete identity & full membership in “the People” only thru the Vision
Quest, & its artistic enactment for the tribe. Thus each person became
an “epic rhapsodist” in sharing this individuality with the
collectivity.
The Pygmies, among the most “primitive” cultures, neither produce nor
consume their music, but become en masse “the Voice of the Forest.” At
the other end of the scale, among complex agricultural societies, like
Bali on the verge of the 20th century, “everyone is an artist” (& in
1980 a Javanese mystic told me, “Everyone must be an artist!”).
The goals of Immediatism lie somewhere along the trajectory described
roughly by these three points (Pygmies, Plains Indians, Balinese), which
have all been linked to the anthropological concept of “democratic
shamanism.” Creative acts, themselves the outer results of the
inwardness of imagination, are not mediated & alienated (in the sense
we’ve been using those terms) when they are carried out BY everyone FOR
everyone—when they are produced but not reproduced—when they are shared
but not fetishezed. Of course these acts are achieved thru mediation of
some sort & to some extent, as are all acts—but they have not yet become
forces of extreme alienation between some Expert/Priest/Producer on the
one hand & some hapless “layperson” or consumer on the other.
Different media therefore exhibit different degrees of mediation—&
perhaps they can even be ranked on that basis. Here everything depends
on reciprocity, on a more-or-less equal exchange of what may be called
“quanta of imagination.” In the case of the epic rhapsodist who mediates
vision for the tribe, a great deal of work—or active dreaming—still
remains to be done by the hearers. They must participate imaginatively
in the act of telling/hearing, & must call up images from their own
stores of creative power to complete the rhapsodist’s act.
In the “ritual theater” of Voodoo & Santeria, everyone present must
participate by visualizing the loas or orishas (imaginal archetypes), &
by calling upon them (with “signature” chants & rhythms) to manifest.
Anyone present may become a “horse” or medium for one of these santos,
whose words & actions then assume for all celebrants the aspect of the
presence of the spirit (i.e. the possessed person does not represent but
presents). This structure, which also underlies Indonesian ritual
theater, may be taken as exemplary for the creative production of
“democratic shamanism.” In order to construct our scale of imagination
for all media, we may start by comparing this “voodoo theater” with the
18th century European theater described by Nietzche.
In the latter, nothing of the original vision (or “spirit”) is actually
present. The actors merely re-present—they are “disguised.” It is not
expected that any member of troupe or audience will suddenly become
possessed (or even “inspired” to any great extent) by the playwright’s
images. The actors are specialists or experts of representation, while
the audience are “laypeople” to whom various images are being
transferred. The audience is passive, too much is being done for the
audience, who are indeed locked in place in darkness & silence,
immobilized by the money they’ve paid for this vicarious experience.
Artaud, who realized this, attempted to revive ritual voodoo theater
(banished from Western Culture by Aristotle)—but he carried out the
attempt within the very structure (actor/audience) of aristotelian
theater; he tried to destroy or mutate it from the inside out. He failed
& went insane, setting off a whole series of experiments which
culminated in the Living Theater’s assault on the actor/audience
barrier, a literal assault which tried to force audience members to
“participate” in the ritual. These experiments produced some great
theater, but all failed in their deepest purpose. None managed to
overcome the alienation Nietzsche & Artaud had criticized.
Even so, Theater occupies a much higher place on the imaginal Scale than
other & later media such as film. At least in theater actors & audience
are physically present in the same space together, allowing for the
creation of what Peter Brook calls the “invisible golden chain” of
attention & fellow-feeling between actors & audience—the well-known
“magic” or theater. With film, however, this chain is broken. Now the
audience sits alone in the dark with nothing to do, while the absent
actors are represented by gigantic icons. Always the same no matter how
many times it is “shown,” made to be reproduced mechanically, devoid of
all “aura,” film actually forbids its audience to “participate”—film has
no need of the audience’s imagination. Of course, film does need the
audience’s money, & money is a kind of concretized imaginal residue,
after all.
Einstein would point out that montage establishes a dialectic tension in
film which engages the viewer’s mind—intellect & imagination—& Disney
might add (if he were capable of ideology) that animation increases this
effect because animation is, in effect, completely made up of montage.
Film too has its “magic.” Granted. But from the point of view of
structure we have come a long way from voodoo theater & democratic
shamanism—we have come perilously close to the commodification of the
imagination, & to the alienation of commodity-relations. We have almost
resigned our power of flight, even of dream-flight.
Books? Books as media transmit only words—no sounds, sights, smells or
feels, all of which are left up to the reader’s imagination. Fine… But
there’s nothing “democratic” about books. The author/publisher produces,
you consume. Books appeal to “imaginative” people, perhaps, but all
their imaginal activity really amounts to passivity, sitting alone with
a book, letting someone else tell the story. The magic of books has
something sinister about it, as in Borges’s Library. The Church’s idea
of a list of damnable books probably didn’t go far enough—for in a
sense, all books are damned. The eros of the text is a
perversion—albeit, nevertheless, one to which we are addicted, & in no
hurry to kick.
As for radio, it is clearly a medium of absence—like the book only more
so, since books leave you alone in the light, radio alone in the dark.
The more exacerbated passivity of the “listener” is revealed by the fact
that advertisers pay for spots on radio, not in books (or not very
much). Nevertheless radio leaves a great deal more imaginative “work”
for the listener than, say, television for the viewer. The magic of
radio: one can use it to listen to sunspot radiation, storms on Jupiter,
the whizz of comets. Radio is old-fashioned; therein lies its
seductiveness. Radio preachers say, “Put your haaadns on the Radio,
brothers & sisters, & feel the heeeeaaaling power of the Word!” Voodoo
Radio?
(Note: A similar analysis of recorded music might be made: i.e., that it
is alienating but not yet alienated. Records replaced family amateur
music-making. Recorded music is too ubiquitous, too easy—that which is
not present is not rare. And yet there’s a lot to be said for scratchy
old 78s played over distant radio stations late at night—a flash of
illumination which seems to spark across all the levels of mediation &
achieve a paradoxical presence.)
It’s in this sense that we might perhaps give some credence to the
otherwise dubious proposition that “radio is good—television evil!” For
television occupies the bottom rung of the scale of imagination in
media. No that’s not true. “Virtual Reality” is even lower. But TV is
the medium the Situationists meant when they referred to “the
Spectacle.” Television is the medium which Immediatism most wants to
overcome. Books, theater, film & radio all retain what Benjamin called
“the utopian trace” (at least in potential)—the last vestige of an
impulse against alienation, the last perfume of the imagination. TV
however began by erasing even that trace. No wonder the first
broadcasters of video were the Nazis. TV is to the imagination what
virus is to the DNA. The end. Beyond TV there lies only the infra-media
realm of no-space/no-time, the instantaneity & ecstasis of CommTech,
pure speed, the downloading of consciousness into the machine, into the
program—in other words, hell.
Does this mean that Immediatism wants to “abolish television”? No,
certainly not—for Immediatism wants to be a game, not a political
movement, & certainly not a revolution with the power to abolish any
medium. The goals of Immediatism must be positive, not negative. We feel
no calling to eliminate any “means of production” (or even
re-production) which might after all some day fall into the hands of “a
people.”
We have analyzed media by asking how much imagination is involved in
each, & how much reciprocity, solely in order to implement for ourselves
the most effective means of solving the problem outlined by Nietzsche &
felt so painfully by Artaud, the problem of alienation. For this task we
need a rough hierarchy of media, a means of measuring their potential
for our uses. Roughly, then, the more imagination is liberated & shared,
the more useful the medium.
Perhaps we can no longer call up spirits to possess us, or visit their
realms as the shamans did. Perhaps no such spirits exist, or perhaps we
are too “civilized” to recognize them. Or perhaps not. The creative
imagination, however, remains for us a reality—& one which we must
explore, even in the vain hope of our salvation.
Every culture (or anyway every major urban/agricultural culture)
cherishes two myths which apparently contradict each other: the myth of
Degeneration & the myth of Progress. Réné Guénon & the
neo-traditionalits like to pretend that no ancient culture ever believed
in Progress, but of course they all did.
One version of the myth of Degeneration in Indo-European culture centers
around the image of metals: gold, silver, bronze, iron. But what of the
myth wherein Kronos & the Titans are destroyed to make way for Zeus &
the Olympians?—a story which parallels that of Tiamat & Marduk, or
Leviathan & Jah. In these “Progress” myths, an earlier chthonic chaotic
earthbound (or watery) “feminine” pantheon is replaced (overthrown) by a
later spiritualized orderly heavenly “male” pantheon. Is this not a step
forward in Time? And have not Buddhism, Christianity, & Islam all
claimed to be better than paganism?
In truth of course both myths—Degeneration as well as Progress—serve the
purpose of Control & the Society of Control. Both admit that before the
present state of affairs something else existed, a different form of the
Social. In both cases we appear to be seeing a ��race-memory” vision of
the Paleolithic, the great long unchanging pre-history of the human. In
one case that era is seen as a nastily brutish vast disorder; the 18th
century did not discover this viewpoint, but found it already expressed
in Classical & Christian culture. In the other case, the primordial is
viewed as precious, innocent, happier, & easier than the present, more
numinous than the present—but irrevocably vanished, impossible to
recover except through death.
Thus for all loyal & enthusiastic devotees of Order, Order presents
itself as immeasurably more perfect than any original Chaos; while for
the disaffected potential enemies of Order, Order presents itself as
cruel & oppressive (“iron”) bu utterly & fatally unavoidable—in fact,
omnipotent.
In neither case will the mythopoets of Order admit that “Chaos” or “the
Golden Age” could still exist in the present, or that they do exist in
the present, here & now in fact—but repressed by the illusory totality
of the Society of Order. We however believe that “the paleolithic”
(which is neither more nor less a myth than “chaos” or “golden age”)
does exist even now as a kind of unconscious within the social. We also
believe that as the Industrial Age comes to an end, & with it the last
of the Neolithic “agricultural revolution,” & with it the decay of the
last religions of Order, that this “repressed material” will once again
be uncovered. What else could we mean when we speak of “psychic
nomadism” or “the disappearance of the Social”?
The end of the Modern does not mean a return TO the Paleolithic, but a
return OF the Paleolithic.
Post-classical (or post-academic) anthropology has prepared us for this
return of the repressed, for only very recently have we come to
understand & sympathize with hunter/gatherer societies. The caves of
Lascaux were rediscovered precisely when they needed to be rediscovered,
for no ancient Roman nor medieval Christian nor 18th century rationalist
could have ever have found them beautiful or significant. In these caves
(symbols of an archaeology of consciousness) we found the artists who
created them; we discovered them as ancestors, & also as ourselves,
alive & present.
Paul Goodman once defined anarchism as “neolithic conservatism.” Witty,
but no longer accurate. Anarchism (or Ontological Anarchism, at least)
no longer sympathizes with peasant agriculturalists, but with the
non-authoritarian social structures & pre-surplus-value economics of the
hunter/gatherers. Moreover we cannot describe this sympathy as
“conservative.” A better term would be “radical,” since we have found
our roots in the Old Stone Age, a kind of eternal present. We do not
wish to return to a material technology of the past (we have no desire
to bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age), but rather for the return of a
psychic technology which we forgot we possessed.
The fact that we find Lascaux beautiful means that Babylon has at last
begun to fall. Anarchism is probably more a symptom than a cause of this
melting away. Despite our utopian imagination we do not know what to
expect. But we, at least, are prepared for the drift into the unknown.
For us it is an adventure, not the End of the World. We have welcomed
the return of Chaos, for along with the danger comes—at last—a chance to
create.
What’s so funny about Art?
Was Art laughed to death by dada? Or perhaps this sardonicide took place
even earlier, with the first performance of Ubu Roi? Or with
Baudelaire’s sarcastic phantom-of-the-opera laughter, which so disturbed
his good bourgeois friends?
What’s funny about Art (though it’s more funny-peculiar than
funny-ha-ha) is the sight of the corpse that refuses to lie down, this
zombie jamboree, this charnel puppetshow with all the strings attached
to Capital (bloated Diego Rivera-style plutocrat), this moribund
simulacrum jerking frenetically around, pretending to be the one single
most truly alive thing in the universe.
In the face of an irony like this, a doubleness so extreme it amounts to
an impassable abyss, any healing power of laughter-in-art can only be
rendered suspect, the illusory property of a self-appointed elite or
pseudo-avant-garde. To have a genuine avant-garde, Art must be going
somewhere, & this has long since ceased to be the case. We mentioned
Rivera; surely no more genuinely funny political artist has painted in
our century—but in aid of what? Trotskyism! The deadest dead-end of
twentieth century politics! No healing power here—only the hollow sound
of powerless mockery, echoing over the abyss.
To heal, one first destroys—& political art which falls to destroy the
target of its laughter ends by strengthening the very forces it sought
to attack. “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” sneers the porcine
figure in its shiny top hat (mocking Nietzsche, of course, poor
Nietzsche, who tried to laugh the whole nineteenth century to death, but
ended up a living corpse, whose sister tied strings to his limbs to make
him dance for fascists).
There’s nothing particularly mysterious or metaphysical about the
process. Circumstance, poverty, once forced Rivera to accept a
commission to come to the USA & paint a mural—for Rockfeller!—the very
archetypal Wall Street porker himself! Rivera made his work a blatant
piece of Commie agitprop—& then Rockfeller had it obliterated. As if
this weren’t funny enough, the real joke is that Rockfeller could have
savored victory even more sweetly by not destroying the Art, that
toothless parasite of the interior decorator, that joke.
The dream of Romanticism: that the reality-world of bourgeois values
could somehow be persuaded to consume, to take into itself, an art which
at first seemed like all other art (books to read, paintings to hang on
the wall, etc.), but which would secretly infect that reality with
something else, which would change the way it saw itself, overturn it,
replace it with the revolutionary values of art.
This was also the dream Surrealism dreamed. Even dada, despite its
outward show of cynicism, still dared to hope. From Romanticism to
Situationism, from Blake to 1968, the dream of each succeeding yesterday
became the parlor decor of every tomorrow—bought, chewed, reproduced,
sold, consigned to museums, libraries, universities, & other mausolea,
forgotten, lost, resurrected, turned into nostalgia-craze, reproduced,
sold, etc., etc., ad nauseam.
In order to understand how thoroughly Cruikshank or Daumier or
Grandville or Rivera or Tzara or Duchamp destroyed the bourgeois
worldview of their time, one must bury oneself in a blizzard of
historical references & hallucinate—for in fact the
destruction-by-laughter was a theoretical success but an actual flop—the
dead weight of illusion failed to budge even an inch in the gales of
laughter, the attack of laughter. It wasn’t bourgeois society which
collapsed after all, it was art.
In the light of the trick which has been played on us, it appears to us
as if the contemporary artist were faced with two choices (since suicide
is not a solution): on, to go on launching attack after attack, movement
after movement, in the hope that one day (soon) “the thing” will have
grown so weak, so empty, that it will evaporate & leave us suddenly
alone in the field; or, two, to begin right now immediately live as if
the battle were already won, as if today the artist were no longer a
special kind of person, but each person a special sort of artist. (This
is what the Situationists called “the suppression & realization of
art”).
Both of these options are so “impossible” that to act on either of them
would be a joke. We wouldn’t have to make “funny” art because just
making art would be funny enough to bust a gut. But at least it would be
our joke. (Who can say for certain that we would fail? “I love not
knowing the future”—Nietzsche. In order to begin to play this game,
however, we shall probably have to set certain rules for ourselves:
There are no issues. There is no such thing as sexism, fascism,
speciesism, looksism, or any other “franchise issue” which can be
separated out from the social complex & treated with “discourse” as a
“problem.” There exists only the totality which subsumes all these
illusory “issues” into the complete falsity of its discourse, thus
rendering all opinions, pro & con, into mere thought-commodities to be
bought & sold. And this totality is itself an illusion, an evil
nightmare from which we are trying (through art, or humor, or by any
other means) to awaken.
As much as possible whatever we do must be done outside the
psychic/economic structure set up by the totality as the permissible
space for the game of art. How, you ask, are we to make a living without
galleries, agents, museums, commercial publishing, the NEA, & other
welfare agencies of the arts? Oh well, one need not ask for the
improbable. But one must indeed demand the “impossible”—or else why the
fuck is one an artist?! It’s not enough to occupy a special holy catbird
seat called Art from which to mock at the stupidity & injustice of the
“square” world. Art is part of the problem. The Art World has its head
up its ass, & it has become necessary to disengage—or else live in a
landscape full of shit.
Of course one must go on “making a living” somehow—but the essential
thing is to make a life. Whatever we do, whichever option we choose
(perhaps all of them), or however badly we compromise, we should pray
never to mistake art for life: Art is brief, Life is long. We should try
to be prepared to drift, to nomadize, to slip out of all nets, to never
settle down, to live through many arts, to make our lives better than
our art, to make art our boast rather than our excuse.
The healing laugh (as opposed to the poisonous & corrosive laugh) can
only arise from an art which is serious—serious—but not sober. Pointless
morbidity, cynical nihilism, trendy postmodern frivolity,
whining/bitching/moaning (the liberal cult of the “victim”), exhaustion,
Baudrillardian ironic hyperconformity—none of these options is serious
enough, & at the same time none is intoxicated enough to suit our
purposes, much less elicit our laughter.
The categories of naive art, art brut, & insane or eccentric art, which
shade int various & further categories of neo-primitive or
urban-primitive art—all these ways of categorizing & labelling art
remain senseless:—that is, not only ultimately useless but also
essentially unsensual, unconnected to body & desire. What really
characterizes all these art forms? Not their marginality in relation to
a mainstream of art/discourse?! If we were to say that there’s a
“post-modernist” discourse currently going on, then the concept “margin”
no longer holds any meaning. Post-post-modernism, however, will not even
admit the existence of any discourse of any sort. Art has fallen silent.
There are no more categories, much less maps of “center” & “margin.” We
are free of all that shit, right?
Wrong. Because one category survives: Capital. Too-Late Capitalism. The
Spectacle, the Simulation, Babylon, whatever you want to call it. All
art can be positioned or labelled in relation to this “discourse.” And
it is precisely & only in relation to this “metaphysical”
commodity-spectacle that “outsider” art must be called im-mediate. It
does not pass thru the para-medium of the spectacle. It is meant only
for the artist & the artist’s “immediate entourage” (friends, family,
neighbors, tribe); & it participates only in a “gift” economy of
positive reciprocity. Only this non-category of “Immediatism” can
therefore approach an adequate understanding & defense of the bodily
aspects of “outsider” art, its connection to the senses & to desire, &
its avoidance or even ignorance of the mediation/alienation inherent in
spectacular recuperation & reproduction. Mind you, this has nothing to
do with the content of any outsider genre, nor for that matter does it
concern the form or the intention of the work, nor the naivete or
knowingness of the artist or recipients of the art. Its “Immediatism”
lies solely in its means of imaginal production. It communicates or is
“given” from person to person, “breast-to-breast” as the sufis say,
without passing thru the distortion-mechanism of the spectacular
para-medium.
When Yugoslavian or Haitian or NYC-grafitti art was “discovered” &
commodified, the result failed to satisfy on several points:—(1) in
terms of the pseudo-discourse of the “Art World,” all so-called
“naivete” is doomed to remain quaint, even campy, & decidedly
marginal—even when it commands high prices (for a year or two). The
forced entrance of outsider art into the commodity spectacle is a
humiliation. (2) Recuperation as commodity engages the artist in
“negative reciprocity”—i.e., where first the artist “received
inspiration” as a free gift, & then “made a donation” directly to other
people, who might or might not “give back” their understanding, or
mystification, or a turkey & a keg of beer (positive reciprocity), the
artist now first creates for money & receives money, while any aspects
of “gift” exchange recede into secondary levels of meaning & finally
begin to fade (negative reciprocity). Finally we have tourist art, & the
condescending amusement, & then the condescending boredom, of those who
will no longer pay for the “inauthentic.” (3) Or else the Art World
vampirizes the energy of the outsider, sucks everything out & then
passes on the corpse to the advertising world or the world of “popular”
entertainment. By this reproduction the art finally loses its “aura” &
shrivels & dies. True, the “utopian trace” may remain, but in essence
the art has been betrayed.
The unfairness of such terms as “insane” or “neo-primitive” art lies in
the fact that this art is not produced only by the mad or innocent, but
by all those who evade the alienation of the para-medium. Its true
appeal lies in the intense aura it acquires thru immediate imaginal
presence, not only in its “visionary” style or content, but most
importantly by its mere present-ness (i.e., it is “here” & it is a
“gift”). In this sense it is more, not less, noble than “mainstream” art
of the post-modern era—which is precisely the art of an absence rather
than a presence.
The only fair way (or “beauty way,” as the Hopi say) to treat “outsider”
art would seem to be to keep it “secret”—to refuse to define it—to pass
it on as a secret, person-to-person, breast-to-breast—rather than pass
it thru the para-medium (slick journals, quarterlies, galleries,
museums, coffee-table books, MTV, etc.). Or even better:—to become “mad”
& “innocent” ourselves—for so Babylon will label us when we neither
worship nor criticize it anymore—when we have forgotten it (but not
“forgiven” it!), & remembered our own prophetic selves, our bodies, our
“true will.”
Any number can play but the number must be predetermined. Six to 25
seems about right.
The basic structure is a banquet or picnic. Each player must bring a
dish or bottle, etc., of sufficient quantity that everyone gets at least
a serving. Dishes can be prepared or finished on the spot, but nothing
should be bought ready-made (except wine & beer, although these could
ideally be home-made). The more elaborate the dishes the better. Attempt
to be memorable. The menu need not be left to surprise (although this is
an option)—some groups may want to coordinate the banquets so as to
avoid duplications or clashes. Perhaps the banquet could have a theme &
each player could be responsible for a given course (appetizer, soup,
fish, vegetables, meat, salad, dessert, ices, cheeses, etc.). Suggested
themes: Fourier’s Gastrosophy—Surrealism—Native American—Black & Red
(all food black or red in honor of anarchy)—etc.
The banquet should be carried out with a certain degree of formality:
toasts, for example. Maybe “dress for dinner” in some way? (Imagine for
example that the banquet theme were ���Surrealism”; the concept “dress for
dinner” takes on a certain meaning). Live music at the banquet would be
fine, providing some of the players were content to perform for the
others as their “gift,” & eat later. (Recorded music is not
appropriate.)
The main purpose of the potlatch is of course gift-giving. Every player
should arrive with one or more gifts & leave with one or more different
gifts. This could be accomplished in a number of ways: (a) Each player
brings one gift & passes it to the person sealed next to them at table
(or some similar arrangement); (b) Everyone brings a gift for every
other guest. The choice may depend on the number of players, with (a)
better for larger groups & (b) for smaller gatherings. If the choice is
(b), you may want to decide beforehand whether the gifts should be the
same or different. For example, if I am playing with five other people,
do I bring (say) five hand-painted neckties, or five totally different
gifts? And will the gifts be given specifically to certain individuals
(in which case they might be crafted to suit the recipient’s
personality), or will they be distributed by lot?
The gifts must be made by the players, not ready-made. This is vital.
Premanufactured elements can go into the making of the gifts, but each
gift must be an individual work of art in its own right. If for instance
I bring five handpainted neckties, I must paint each one myself, either
with the same or with different designs, although I may be allowed to
buy ready-made ties to work on.
Gifts need not be physical objects. One player’s gift might be live
music during dinner, another’s might be a performance. However, it
should be recalled that in the Amerindian potlatches the gifts were
supposed to be superb & even ruinous for the givers. In my opinion
physical objects are best, & they should be as good as possible—not
necessarily costly to make, but really impressive. Traditional
potlatches involved prestige-winning. Players should feel a competitive
spirit of giving, a determination to make gifts of real splendor or
value. Groups may wish to set rules beforehand about this—some may wish
to insist on physical objects, in which case music or performance would
simply become extra acts of generosity, but hors de potlatch, so to
speak.
Our potlatch is non-traditional, however, in that theoretically all
players win—everyone gives & receives equally. There’s no denying
however that a dull or stingy player will lose prestige, while an
imaginative and/or generous player will gain “face.” In a really
successful potlatch each player will be equally generous, so that all
players will be equally pleased. The uncertainty of outcome adds a zest
of randomness to the event.
The host, who supplies the place, will of course be put to extra trouble
& expense, so that an ideal potlatch would be part of a series in which
each player takes a turn as host. In this case another competition for
prestige would transpire in the course of the series:—who will provide
the most memorable hospitality? Some groups may want to set rules
limiting the host’s duties, while others may wish to leave hosts free to
knock themselves out; however, in the latter case, there should really
be a complete series of events, so that no one need feel cheated, or
superior, in relation to the other players. But in some areas & for some
groups the entire series may simply not be feasible. In New York for
example not everyone has enough room to host even a small party. In this
case the hosts will inevitably win some extra prestige. And why not?
Gifts should not be “useful.” They should appeal to the senses. Some
groups may prefer works of art, others might like home-made preserves &
relishes, or gold frankincense & myrrh, or even sexual acts. Some ground
rules should be agreed on. No mediation should be involved in the
gift—no videotapes, tape recordings, printed material, etc. All gifts
should be present at the potlatch “ceremony”—i.e. no tickets to other
events, no promises, no postponements. Remember that the purpose of the
game, as well as its basic rule, is to avoid all mediation & even
representation—to be “present,” to give “presents.”
The problem is not that too much has been revealed, but that every
revelation finds its sponsor, its CEO, its monthly slick, its clone
Judases & replacement people.
You can’t get sick from too much knowledge—but we can suffer from the
virtualization of knowledge, its alienation from us & its replacement by
a weird dull changeling or simulacrum—the same “data,” yes, but now
dead—like supermarket vegetables; no “aura.”
Our malaise (January 1, 1992) arises from this: we hear not the language
but the echo, or rather the reproduction ad infinitum of the language,
its reflection upon a reflection-series of itself, even more
self-referential & corrupt. The vertiginous perspectives of this VR
datascape nauseate us because they contain no hidden spaces, no
privileged opacities.
Infinite access to knowledge that simply fails to interact with the body
or with the imagination—in fact the manichean ideal of fleshless
soulless thought—modern media/politics as pure gnostic mentation, the
anaesthetic ruminations of Archons & Aeons, suicide of the Elect…
The organic is secretive—it secretes secrecy like sap. The inorganic is
a demonic democracy—everything equal, but equally valueless. No gifts,
only commodities. The Manichaeans invented usury. Knowledge can act as a
kind of poison, as Nietzsche pointed out.
Within the organic (“Nature,” “everyday life”) is embedded a kind of
silence which is not just dumbness, an opacity which is not mere
ignorance—a secrecy which is also an affirmation—a tact which knows how
to act, how to change things, how to breathe into them.
Not a “cloud of unknowing”—not “mysticism”—we have no desire to deliver
ourselves up again to that obscurantist sad excuse for
fascism—nevertheless we might invoke a sort of taoist sense of
“suchness-of-things”—“a flower does not talk,” & it’s certainly not the
genitals which endow us with logos. (On second thought, perhaps this is
not quite true; after all, myth offers us the archetype of Priapus, a
talking penis.) An occultist would ask how to “work” this silence—but
we’d rather ask how to play it, like musicians, or like the playful boy
of Heraclitus.
A bad mood in which every day is the same. When are a few lumps going to
appear in this smooth time? Hard to believe in the return of Carnival,
of Saturnalia. Perhaps time has stopped here in the Pleroma, here in the
Gnostic dreamworld where our bodies are rotting but our “minds” are
downloaded into eternity. We know so much—how can we not know the answer
to this most vexing of questions?
Because the answer (as in Odilon Redon’s “Harpocrates”) isn’t answered
in the language of reproduction but in that of gesture, touch, odor, the
hunt. Finally virtu is impassable—eating & drinking is eating &
drinking—the lazy yokel plows a crooked furrow. The Wonderful World of
Knowledge has turned into some kind of PBS Special from Hell. I demand
real mud in my stream, real watercress. Why, the natives are not only
sullen, they’re taciturn—downright incommunicative. Right,, gringo,
we’re tired of your steenking surveys, tests & questionnaires. There are
some things bureaucrats were not meant to know—& so there are some
things which even artists should keep secret. This is not
self-censorship nor self-ignorance. It is cosmic tact. It is our homage
to the organic, its uneven flow, its backcurrents & eddies, its swamps &
hideouts. If art is “work” then it will become knowledge & eventually
lose its redemptive power & even its taste. But if art is “play” then it
will both preserve secrets & tell secrets which will remain secrets.
Secrets are for sharing, like all of Nature’s secretions. Is knowledge
evil? We’re no mirror-image Manichees here—we’re counting on dialectics
to break a few bricks. Some knowledge is dadata, some is commodata. Some
knowledge is wisdom—some simply an excuse for doing nothing, desiring
nothing. Mere academic knowledge, for example, or the knowingness of the
nihilist post-mods, shades off into realms of the UnDead—& the UnBorn.
Some knowledge breathers—some knowledge suffocates. What we know & how
we know it must have a basis in the flesh—the whole flesh, not just a
brain in a jar of formaldehyde. The knowledge we want is neither
utilitarian nor “pure” but celebratory. Anything else is a totentanz of
data-ghosts, the “beckoning fair ones” of the media, the Cargo Cult of
too-Late Capitalist epistemology.
If I could escape this bad mood of course I’d do so, & take you with me.
What we need is a plan. Jail break? tunnel? a gun carved of soap, s
sharpened spoon, a file in a cake? a new religion?
Let me be your wandering bishop. We’ll play with the silence & make it
ours. Soon as Spring comes. A rock in the stream, bifurcating its
turbulence. Visualize it: mossy, wet, viridescent as rainy jadefaded
copper struck by lightning. A great toad like a living emerald, like
Mayday. The strength of the bios, like the strength of the bow or lyre,
lies in the bending back.
To speak too much & not be heard—that’s sickening enough. But to acquire
listeners—that could be worse. Listeners think that to listen
suffices—as if their true desire were to hear with someone else’s ears,
see thru someone else’s eyes, feel with someone else’s skin…
The text (or the broadcast) which will change reality:—Rimbaud dreamed
of that & then gave up in disgust. But he entertained too subtle an idea
about magic. The crude truth is perhaps that texts can only change
reality when they inspire readers to see & act, rather than merely see.
Scripture once did this—but Scripture has become an idol. To see thru
its eyes would be to possess (in the Voodoo sense) a statue—or a corpse.
Seeing, & the literature of seeing, is too easy. Enlightenment is easy.
“It’s easy to be a sufi,” a Persian shaykh once told me. What’s
difficult is to be human. Political enlightenment is even easier than
spiritual enlightenment—neither one changes the world or even the self.
Sufism & Situationism—or shamanism & anarchy—the theories I’ve played
with—are just that: theories, visions, ways of seeing. Significantly,
the practice of sufism consists in the repetition of words (dhikr). This
action itself is a text, & nothing but a text. And the “praxis” of
anarcho-situationism amounts to the same: a text, a slogan on a wall. A
moment of enlightenment. Well it’s not totally valueless—but afterwards
what will be different?
We might like to purge our radio of anything which lacks at least the
chance of precipitating that difference. Just as there exist books which
have inspired earthshaking crimes we would like to broadcast texts which
cause hearers to seize (or at least make a grab for) the happiness God
denies us. Exhortations to hijack reality. But even more we would like
to purge our lives of everything which obstructs or delays us from
setting out—not to sell guns & slaves in Abyssinia—not to be either
robbers or cops—not to escape the world or to rule it—but to open
ourselves to difference.
I share with the most reactionary moralists the presumption that art can
really affect reality in this way, & I despise the liberals who say all
art should be permitted because—after all—it’s only art. Thus I’ve taken
to the practice of those categories of writing & radio most hated by
conservatives—pornography & agitprop—in the hope of stirring up trouble
for my readers/hearers & myself. But I accuse myself of ineffectualism,
even futility. Not enough has changed. Perhaps nothing has changed.
Enlightenment is all we have, & even that we’ve had to rip from the
grasp of corrupt gurus & bumbling suicidal intellectuals. As for our
art—what have we accomplished, other than to spill our blood for the
ghostworld of fashionable ideas & images?
Writing has taken us to the very edge beyond which writing may be
impossible. Any texts which could survive the plunge over this edge—into
whatever abyss or Abyssinia lies beyond—would have to be virtually
self-created, like the miraculous hidden-treasure Dakini-scrolls of
Tibet or the tadpole-script spirit-texts of Taoism—& absolutely
incandescent, like the last screamed messages of a witch or heretic
burning at the stake (to paraphrase Artaud).
I can sense these texts trembling just beyond the veil.
What if the mood should strike us to renounce both the mere objectivity
of art & the mere subjectivity of theory? to risk the abyss? What if no
one followed? So much the better, perhaps—we might find our equals
amongst the Hyperboreans. What if we went mad? Well—that’s the risk.
What if we were bored? Ah…
Already some time ago we placed all our bets on the irruption of the
marvelous into everyday life—won a few, then lost heavily. Sufism was
indeed much much easier. Pawn everything then, down to the last
miserable scrawl? double our stakes? cheat?
It’s as if there were angels in the next room beyond thick
walls—arguing? fucking? One can’t make out a single word.
Can we retain ourselves at this late date to become Finders of hidden
treasure? And by what technique, seeing that it is precisely technique
which has betrayed us? Derrangement of the senses, insurrection, piety,
poetry? Knowing how is a cheap mountebank’s trick. But knowing what
might be like divine self-knowledge—it might create ex nihilo.
Finally, however, it will become necessary to leave this city which
hovers immobile on the edge of a sterile twilight, like Hamelin after
all the children were lured away. Perhaps other cities exist, occupying
the same space & time, but…different. And perhaps there exist jungles
where mere enlightenment is outshadowed by the black light of jaguars. I
have no idea—& I’m terrified.