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Title: How Slogans End Author: Alejandro de Acosta Date: 2010, December Language: en Topics: The Anvil Review, review, John Cage, slogans Source: Retrieved on July 12th, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20120706061332/http://theanvilreview.org/print/how-slogans-end/
When you get sleepy, do you go to sleep? Or do you lie awake?”
- Cage, “Composition as Process”
“If among you there are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave
at any moment.”
“If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep”
- Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”
There is a computer program called the Automatic Insurrectionary
Manifesto Generator. AIMG produces this sort of output:
What’s needed is not mobilization, and even far less absence, but a
putting-into-practice of inoperative crisis, a rejection in all forms of
the temporality of humanism.
This is a call to indifference, not an insistence on absence.
We must destroy all humanism—without illusions.
Confronted with those who refuse to recognize themselves in our orgies
of negation, we offer neither criticism nor dialogue but only our scorn.
A link labeled “AGAIN” is conveniently centered below the text, inviting
us to the pleasures of repetition. It reloads the page and each time
generates a three-paragraph manifesto composed of such sentences. AIMG’s
output is wholly predictable, in a ‘mad lib’ sort of way. All the titles
it produces have the same schema: “Leaving X behind: notes on Y,” where
X includes “mobilization,” “activism,” “passivity,” “fossilization,”
“humanism,” and so on; and Y includes “crisis,” “rupture,”
“insurrection,” or “zones of indistinction which need no justification,”
for example. The same goes for the rest of the manifestos. You may have
encountered its output at its home page, whose link was posted and sent
around quite a bit in 2009; or you may have been presented with its
texts in a more or less deceptive, more or less mocking way in blogs, or
in comments on Anarchist News.
A link at the bottom of the page takes us to “insurrect.rb,” the code.
Reading those 126 lines was very interesting; despite my limited
understanding of programming, the way AIMG operates was clear enough.
There is a list of definitions in which words are classed together under
headings such as “things we like,” “things we don’t like,” “things we
do,” “things we don’t do”; for the most part, then, they are groups of
presumed synonyms. (I note with interest that the longest list is
“things we don’t like”.) As I had suspected, the possible outcomes are
finite. At first, reading just the code might suggest that the problem
with the rhetoric of insurrectionary anarchism is that it is not
inventive enough. Its terms are not sufficiently varied or
differentiated and therefore they have a tendency to collapse into each
other. But is the programmer’s goal to use the code to produce a more
artful rhetoric?
On the same page as “insurrect.rb” is a “read me” file, which offers the
following explanation:
The purpose of this little program is to expose the seductions of
rhetoric, not to criticize actions taken. Despite my admiration for many
of the actions taken in the name of insurrection, I’m suspicious of how
easy it is to substitute style for substance in the communiques
describing these actions. And this is not to say that all
‘insurrectionist’ texts are meaningless […] This program is intended
only to demonstrate the pitfalls of language which sounds too good to be
meaningful.
The remarks about substituting “style for substance” and “sounding to
good to be meaningful” suggest the contrary: the “purpose” is less
rhetoric. To the degree that AIMG accomplishes this goal, it does so by
showing the limited inventiveness of what I will call I-discourse. And
it does so from a perspective that opts for an uninventive “substance”
rather than a superior “style.”
One could easily undertake a critique of the programmer’s assumptions by
asking if the lists of “things we like” or “things we don’t like” really
contain interchangeable terms. (Or, supposing that they do, how such
interchangeability comes about). But there is a more interesting issue,
a more profound limitation in the code than finite word lists. Line 75,
for example, reads
“This is a call to #{things_we_like}, not an insistence on
“Do the good, not the bad,” or: “Do what we do, don’t do what we don’t
do.”
These are examples of the simplest grammatical formulations of a moral
code, of a sort we discover in all sorts of discourses. Discovering such
a code puts me beyond the desire to critique (to improve by strategic
negation). The question becomes one of overcoming a morality that is so
easily codified.
The programmer, or whoever wrote the “read me” file, tells me what he
sees as the AIMG’s purpose. I am free to understand its ouput in that
manner or in a variety of others. Now, to overcome the unexamined
morality written into the code, I am concerned first of all with wit.
Supposing the output has something to do with its stated purpose, that
purpose is achieved through being witty. (Of course AIMG is not witty,
because it is not a person. But the programmer probably thought he was
being witty when he assembled it; and many people think they are witty
when they use it and propagate its output.) I take wit to be primarily
an aesthetic matter, to be judged in terms of its success. (And there
are many sorts of successes. It could be that the joke is on the
jokers.) For the overcoming I have in mind, I am also concerned with
importance, with some way of getting at the values at play in a moral or
ethical system. So let us play a logical game, cycling through
possibilities based on varying answers to two questions: Is the AIMG’s
output witty? And: does the AIMG matter?
Given our two questions, there are four positions:
Now, this logical game is just that – of course anyone may occupy one or
more of the positions successively or even simultaneously. But for the
sake of the game I summon up a lunar landscape, where four speakers
deliver their monologues.
The first two positions emphasize writing. Who has already stepped
forward to say that AIMG’s output is witty, and it matters? It is the
Author (and his audience, amused). Such is the position laid out in the
“read me” file; such is the apparent stance of many who posted the link
or examples of its output. For them, the machine works; it does what it
is pronounced to do. It reveals to us our familiarity with a certain
rhetoric. The momentary confusion that accompanies it is supposed to be
funny, and to provoke a particular insight. As Bergson so precisely
illustrated, the comic usually comes down to either a living thing that
acts mechanically or a machine that seems to be alive (See Laughter).
The AIMG is obviously a case of the second. The Author knows that, in
reading an automatically generated manifesto, I will likely, at least
initially, attribute some authorial intention, some message, to the
text. When I discover or when it is revealed to me that I have been
fooled, I may be angry, amused, confused … Aha! And ha! ultimately I
will laughingly accept the lesson of the AIMG. The AIMG’s output is not
meaningful, it is just rhetoric! The apparent fancyness of the language
is belied by the simplicity of reproducing something like it. And, for
the Author (and his audience, amused), such automatically produced
rhetoric is not what our political common sense demands. Sometimes I
want to side with the little pleasure evidenced in this position:
pleasure in a machine that works, the pleasure of repetition. AGAIN!
A second voice intervenes and says: but the AIMG’s output is not
something like I-discourse. The simplicity is in the attempt at
recreation, which therefore fails, not in I-discourse itself, which is
meaningful. This amounts to saying that AIMG’s output is not witty, and
it matters. Who has spoken? It is the Critic. This is the voice of the
audience, unamused, expressing their revolt. For them, the machine does
not work; it does not or cannot do what it is pronounced to do. It
presupposes lazy habits of reading, in which people respond badly to
jargon they do not recognize, complex ideas and theories that require
long study, etc. The Author’s common sense has spoken up and said: the
AIMG demonstrates the hollowness of I-discourse. The Critic responds:
you are the fool who does not discriminate between the meaningful
original and the meaningless bad copy! For this speaker, what the AIMG
actually reveals is a misprision of I-discourse: the output’s lack of
meaning is not an example of anything. The synonyms are not synonyms;
the terms are generally not used with sufficient precision. The Critic
engages, then, in a militant defense of a militant discourse. I am this
critic, too, sometimes: much of the time I want to side with the defense
of complex ideas, of study, even in a certain sense of the mutant speech
that is theoretical jargon, and to be suspicious of the common sense
that warns away from all that. At the same time, it is difficult to side
with a humorless Critic, and unwise to take the side of the good
original against the bad copy.
The latter two positions place emphasis on the activity of reading
rather than that of writing. The third belongs to one who, bored, says
nothing. If we poked him and demanded a response, he might sigh like a
character from Beckett: what matter where the simplicity originates? For
he who is Bored, AIMG’s output is not witty, and it does not matter. The
position of the Bored is similar to that of the Critic, but represents
its degree zero. For him the output’s lack of meaning does not reveal
anything of importance. It rather reveals the habit of reading in a
generic way. When the Bored learns that he has been fooled, all that he
takes to have been revealed is the habit as such. But this sort of
insight is available in more or less any event of reading, whether the
text in question has been written by one or more people, in part or
entirely automatically, etc. I note with interest that this could
equally well be the position of someone who uses I-discourse, or of
someone who does not. The former would be like the Critic, but
unconcerned about the way the AIMG misses the mark. The latter would not
see this as an important lesson: everyone knows that GIGO. Sometimes
this is my position – anytime, really, if I am bored.
This leaves the position of one who thinks AIMG’s output is witty, and
it does not matter. She speaks last. I call this the position of the
Curious. It is similar to the position of the Author, but is
characterized by an excess of amusement, an unruly overflow of amusement
beyond the stated lesson of the “read me.” This amusement, not grounded
in the thought of a lesson or its importance, suggests manners of
writing and reading of which the AIMG is the crudest form. So she has
little use for the AIMG according to its Author’s intention for it,
since she can’t imagine any way to use it and be witty. She who is
Curious says: doesn’t this all suggest that the truly remarkable
question here concerns the capture of a vocabulary by a
grammatical-moral code, whether or not the AIMG is a good example of it?
What does that reveal, not about I-discourse, which is a fashion of the
times, but about political rhetoric (including the minimalist rhetoric
we call “common sense”) in general? Most of the time I am interested in
unserious ways of reading. So, curious, I have seized AIMG as an
example, staging my curiosity by offering an illuminating
counter-example.
There are two computer programs called IC and MESOLIST. They produce
this sort of output:
[]
Using IC and MESOLIST, John Cage invented a writing machine that
produced what he called mesostic poems, a variant of the more familiar
acrostic poem. In acrostics, it is usually the first letter of each line
that, read vertically, forms a name or phrase. In mesostics, the
vertical component, or “spine,” is in the middle of each line. The
mesostics invite multiple forms of reading, not the least of which is
reading aloud, because they are themselves ways of reading and
invitations to creative re-reading. This is so inasmuch as the mesostics
are composed of either an entire given text (in Empty Words, for
example, Cage explains how he used mesostics using the spine “JAMES
JOYCE” to “read through” Finnegans Wake) or a set of quotations from
various writers. Often other strings of letters appear, such as the
names of authors and the titles of books. (One might conclude that it is
not just re-reading or “reading through,” but study that is at stake,
though this would require dramatically re-evaluating what we usually
mean by that word.) Cage composed many texts in which a love of
language, of the ideas, words, and sounds in his preferred authors
combined with his serene and studied use of random processes for
composition. Now, Cage’s music remains obscure for most. Among those I
know who are familiar with his name, it usually functions as a
historical point of reference rather than an object of appreciation (an
artwork). His writing is, I suppose, even more mysterious. But it is
also light, the lightest butterfly-writing one could ever wish to read.
It is our problem if we are the ones who expect a message from either.
Using IC and MESOLIST, Cage wrote several books of compiled and
interlinked mesostics, such as I-VI, Themes and Variations, and the one
that concerns me here, Anarchy. MESOLIST lists “all words” in the source
texts “that satisfy the mesostic rules” (I-VI, 1). IC, “a program …
simulating the coin oracle of the I Ching,” is used to decide “which
words in the lists are to be used and gives … all the central words”
(ibid. A more complete discussion of this process with respect to its
creation and use may be found in Empty Words, 133-136). In Anarchy, the
source material is thirty quotes from Kropotkin, Malatesta, Bakunin,
Tolstoy, Thoreau, Whitman, Goldman, Goodman, Buckminster Fuller, Norman
O. Brown, and Cage himself. For example: “Periods of very slow changes
are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as
necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and
succeed them” (Kropotkin); “The liberty of man consists solely in this:
that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as
such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any
extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual”
(Bakunin). But also: “What we finally seek to do is to create an
environment that works so well that we can run wild in it” (Norman O.
Brown); “I’m an anarchist, same as you when you’re telephoning, turning
on/off the lights, drinking water” (Cage). Or even little stories such
as this one, drawn from Hyppolite Havel’s biographical sketch of Emma
Goldman: “In San Francisco, in 1908, Emma Goldman’s lecture attracted a
soldier of the United States Army, William Buwalda. For daring to attend
an Anarchist meeting, the free Republic court-martialed Buwalda and
imprisoned him for one year. Thanks to the regenerating power of the new
philosophy, the government lost a soldier, but the cause of liberty
gained a man.”
These quotations and the twenty-five others, in which the use of
“rhetoric” as construed by the Author and the Critic is generally at a
minimum, reappear in fragmentary form according to the processes
described above. Sometimes, as in the mesostic I have already cited, the
explicitly anarchist nature of the content is evident (though not for
all that clear in the sense implied by the desire to reverse the
priorities of “style” and “substance”). Sometimes it is not so evident:
[]
Most of the mesostics invite me to active reading. How many ways can you
read this delightfully polysemic excerpt?
[]
Cage’s mesostics may be understood in the context of a long history of
writing experiments undertaken for their own sake, that is to say: for
pleasure. This field is vast, but arguably its sundry protagonists all
share in a suspicion towards, a methodical sidestepping of, the
traditional image of the artist as beautiful and creative soul who,
inspired, materializes the artwork. They all have in common a sense that
there are social, political, psychological, even metaphysical blocks to
the outflow of creativity. Arguably, from Dada to Burroughs and beyond,
many of these experiments have discovered their pleasure in some form or
another of the game called épater la bourgeoise. For Cage, by contrast,
the writing machine that makes mesostics is meant neither to shock
anyone nor to reveal a hidden truth or reality by subverting the rules
of writing. If there is a resemblance to the motivations of the authors
I am alluding to, it is in their common suspicion of the author as ego,
as consciousness. In their own way they all echo that fascinating
Nietzschean lesson, that consciousness is a second-order process, a
derivative of the interplay (“combat”) of non-conscious forces, drives,
affects, or desires. What Cage added, then, is the most innocent turn
imaginable: I would say that, rather than shocking, he only wishes to
play.
Indeed, there is no critique, implicit or explicit, in Cage’s writing
machine. What goes in is what he wishes to affirm; what comes out is in
another way also what he wishes to affirm. They are “golden passages,”
as Giambattista Vico used to say. There is no real point to this
doubling other than the pleasure it affords: there is no growth or
insight, other than one which may come as randomly as any as long as we
keep playing. “As we go along (who knows?) an idea may occur in this
talk. I have no idea whether one will or not. If one does, let it”
(“Lecture on Nothing,” 110). Cage followed Buckminster Fuller and
Marshall McLuhan in claiming that work was already obsolete. “Instead of
working, to quote McLuhan, we now brush information against information.
We are doing everything we can to make new connections” (Anarchy, vi).
Reading is then the last thing we should describe as labor: the labor of
reading, in all its seriousness, is subsumed in a game of reading. The
game is not a way to unwind from labor; but labor is a particularly
wound-up sort of move in the game. It is justifiable only as a matter of
taste.
Cage paid homage to his influences and inspirations in a schizoid way,
drawing them into, drawing them along in his mesostics. Who among us
knows how to play along with such unserious affirmations? Many of the
more or less anonymous masks that leave their comments on the mirror
pools of the Great Web know what to do with such a list of names and
such a set of quotations. They attack some names, defend others, negate,
launch petty attacks, etc. The paranoia of Critics! When we are these
sad egos we miss the pure affirmation of Cage’s writing machine. It
multiplies the originals, diffracting them not just by reinterpretation
or application of them to new conjunctures and objects; it disassembles
them down to the level of word, letter, and phoneme. This is precisely
how we could overcome the sad egos that we accidentally fall into being.
(Sadness is always an accident.) Embracing randomness, chaos, everything
in language games or discourses or speech genres that is not under our
control: it could mean liberating our language, if that does not sound
too trite. It could also mean unbounded pleasure.
When it occurred to me to seize upon the AIMG as an example, I supposed
I had been waiting on Cage, patiently seeking an opportunity to
re-engage with and share his mesostic experiments. Now I feel things are
the other way around, as though he had been waiting on me, offering his
smiling face as a mask. I daresay I have been used by him – in the
gentlest way imaginable. I have proposed that the mesostics in Anarchy
are the illuminating counter-example we need to question the AIMG. But I
also think I have made clear that they are not against, counter to,
anything. It is ultimately not interesting to me to occupy the position
of the Author nor that of the Critic. I find nothing objectionable in
the existence or use of AIMG. I occupy rather the readerly positions of
the Bored and the Curious. But he who is Bored has nothing to add to
this conversation (unless, interestingly, it becomes a conversation
about boredom – but I will leave that for a future essay). She who is
Curious regards AIMG as an embryo of something, as an opportunity to
read and write differently – perhaps, eventually, to speak differently
as well. A hint of this was evidenced when someone commented on
Anarchist News that some of AIMG’s output was not so bad, after all:
“yeah! a few times i found some lines that i actually dug! haha!” Let us
go farther in this absurdist, affirmative direction. It is, I think, the
mask Cage was always holding out to us. Let us treat AIMG as a partial,
unconscious, fortuitous reach in the direction of a project I would like
to fantasize about more fully: a way of rewriting and rereading
everything that we care to read. A machine to dissolve slogans.
Let me explain. I place myself between the Bored and the Curious because
I have little use for AIMG as it is offered to me by someone who says
“this program is intended only…” But neither do I want to intervene and
replace that intention with another, correct, counter-intention. Someone
wants the program only to show something about the rhetoric of
I-discourse, and perhaps more generally about rhetoric; I reply: that is
only another floating statement. It seems to me that a written statement
of intention, separate from the writing in question, should be
approached as the strangest of clues. Especially when the Author is more
or less anonymous; at least presented with a body and a face one may
hear the tone of words, study facial expressions, analyze posture and
gesture, take in the surroundings and context, and so on. This is
already the case when one is reading a poem, essay, or manifesto. It is
far more of a problem when it comes to randomly generated output. So I
have set aside the authority of the Author, and treated his claim of
intention merely as one way of reading. His is a rhetoric that aims to
dissolve itself: the rhetoric of minimal rhetoric, perhaps of zero
rhetoric. What about rhetoric as an art? It has long been agreed that
rhetoric must involve an aesthetic component, since it is first and
foremost the art of speaking to crowds, of condensing a message. The
message, unfolded, could in some cases be spelled out as a series of
reasoned arguments; enfolded, the arguments become enthymemes, generated
by the invention of the speaker. The art is in the invention, which,
classically, means the speaker’s style. Suspicion towards rhetoric is
(which is as ancient as rhetoric) is focused on the danger of a message,
surreptitiously encoded in an eloquent style, and so concealed from
reasoned criticism: an enthymeme that is lovely or effective but that
does not unfold into a reasoned argument. “Sounds good” is thus
suspiciously separated from “is meaningful” and the relation between the
two is always in question.
Here I invoke Cage’s mesostics, and generally his practice of voiding
his art of intention and ego. If there is any rhetoric in the mesostics,
it is in the input alone; the poetic form makes it impossible to deliver
a message. This strange form of communication that undoes rhetoric also
unbinds aesthetics and morality. The author of AIMG both chooses his
lists of synonyms and composes the (moral) code that arranges them; the
mesostics, though they begin with golden passages, do not allow their
author any control over their fragmentary rearrangement in the poems (as
parts or as wholes), and thus the code does not contain, explicitly or
even implicitly, a morality. There is thus no problem with rhetoric,
because it has finally been undone; but there is a curious question of
aesthetics (of pleasure) left over. “Sounds good” as well as “is
meaningful” can no more be said to coincide than to differ. The question
becomes not “does it say anything?” or “what does it say?” but “who is
reading?”
Releasing writing from intention and thus from morality, voiding
intention and thus the ego in writing, is the barely explored challenge
that AIMG gestures towards. And it is Cage’s mesostics, or something
like them, that allow us to flesh out the fantastic reach of such a
gesture. It is the greater randomness of Cage’s process that allows us
to both diagnose the secret alliance between the ego and morality (we
could call it conscience) in political rhetoric and to discover the ego
in its very emergence. I mean that, in the terms I have been employing,
the ego emerges in reading, not in writing. Ego is not there in the
composition of a text or code, but seems to have been there after the
fact; this semblance, this mask, depends on ignoring or minimizing the
importance of our practices of reading. I am not suggesting that the ego
should always be voided (as though that was up to us!), but that it is
productive and endlessly fascinating to create writing machines that
allow us to discover it. If we do this gracefully, we will guiltlessly
summon up pleasure. We might eventually get better at observing how our
egos, our masks, congeal in more or less rigid acts of reading. Boredom
is one path; curiosity is another. The Author and the Critic cling too
rigidly in their roles to the importance of their activities to allow,
as the Bored and the Curious do, their masks to dissolve or shatter in
excessive laughter. Nonserious reading: ludic, festive, voluptuous.
It could begin by inventing and using writing machines that consume and
transform every dull index that crosses our paths: I mean all those
unexamined words that make up our slogans, that pepper our statements of
intent, mission and vision, our little manifestos. I also mean those
mana-words that theoreticians enjoy moving around their chessboards. We
can do it if we can learn to inject the impersonal and random into our
writing, and eventually our speech. I dream of a way to complicate the
desire to say, speak, or mark, to send a message or command, in its
badly omened collusion with repetition. Ah, the dull indices! Who is not
tired of Freedom, Democracy, Sustainability, Consent … even of Attack
and Destroy? Clearly AIMG does not go far enough. We need a superior
machine, a crueler code.
Reading through AIMG, one last program, MESOSTOMATIC:
[]
Reading through “How Slogans End,” too:
[]
AGAIN!
Links:
Works Cited:
Cage, John. “Composition as Process” and “Lecture on Nothing.” In
Silence. Wesleyan, 1961.
—. Empty Words. Wesleyan, 1979.
—. I-VI. Wesleyan, 1997.
—. Anarchy. Wesleyan, 2001.