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More on Exodus...

More fun with over-consciousness?

There seems to be an upsurge in the use by capitalists of images from the (visual) history of opposition to capitalism. I doubt there is much sophistication in this domain, more lazyness and cliche than an attempt to de-claw and accomodate The Angel of History. There is no history for the late-capitalist. It's all this day's thing. What's selling? What's in fashion? Will a red flag sell a beer, a bank account,a mobile phone? - all examples of Soviet communist-style adverts witnessed by The Ruinist. At least it can be amusing and you can play with it. I failed to snag myself a copy of the huge poster in the cheap clothes store Peacocks in the Elephant shopping centre. Featuring two ladies dressed in furs and fancy dresses, Czar-chic, more Romanov than Bolshie, they clutched red flags in their hands as history was replayed here as merely a bunch of things Russian. I would have put a bottle of vodka in their others hands, but it wasn't my call. For that you need to go to the Soho bar called 'Revolution' that features more from the I-Spy Book of Russia. It's a 'Vodka-Bar' so the faux cyrillic of the brand nicely rounds out the cliche.


But I'm teasing you here as I've been holding out for the big one. You should go to Dean Street, home of Marx in his later years and now the home of RedVeg, a fast food burger bar that uses in its livery Lenin, Ho Chi Min, Marx and Guevara all in one! A free magazine called LifeScape that I conveniently picked up at the counter fills me in on the deal, featuring as it does, a double page interview with the owner of the joint:

Lifescape: What is the concept behind RedVeg?
RedVegMan: We use the Vietnamese (red) star. The iconistic/revolutionary imagery shows the flipside of the coin to the aggressive fast food chains.
Later...RedVegMan: In the future we would like to franchise out. I could see RedVeg in every big town in England and eventually in every high street.

I myself, if I had the money, would happilly eat here for the rest of my life and bask in the pure absurdity of the place. My chips and breaded mushrooms were wolfed down like a hungry peasant under the eyes of a disapproving Lenin, burger in his hand. It's like Disneyland for the political animal. The main ride is a rude one but it's a headfuck! If you remain a pretty dour wounded beast, unable to believe that Marxist superheroes can be used to sell vegetarain burgers, then don't go there. You'll end up inside. Either the nick or the mental hospital. If you can laugh at the difficulties of consciousness that I'm trying to type about here then go get your Greek Salad.


When Disneyland arrives for real in your home country...
Maybe these realist images are redundant here in the western world? Do they lack meaning and relevance because everything seems okay for those with a little, little bit, that our fantastic social democracy with neo-liberal tentacles makes Revolution unnecessary. Or because like any image here, they are just one of one million other images without a social context that we will encounter on any one day. In Latin America, for example, Guevara portraits or red flags or Marxist murals still inspire political movement(s). Regardless of the nonsense of hierarchical Leftist politics, there remains a potency with these symbols and images. But then in, say, Bolivia, the contradictions don't really need to be pored over too much. Privatising the rain water? I bet they'd laugh for a bit of our funky subtle Western contradictions. If they could, they could come to Waterloo, to the bar called 'Cubana' where Cuban Revolutionary chic is painted large and machine guns hang on the wall next to portraits of Fidel. You can drink cocktails called 'Molotov' or 'Revolution' containing their house rum Bacardi, an imperialist brand subject to an international boycott by those in solidarity with Cuba. Our Bolivian friends would no doubt enjoy the large proclaimation on a wall of Cubana, 'Venceramos', an emotional cheer made in solidarity with all poor people of the world that 'we will win!'.

Having fun with over-consciousness? Are we having fun yet?
I'd like to return to the problem or solution of Exodus and may well do that. As we try to desert the integrated spectacle of modern living, the pointed discrepencies about 'Who knows' or 'Who cares' about the catastrophe of capitalism for the human and animal species, may yet be resolved. 'Political' consciousness may really only turn out to be a regime of knowledge that binds us to power. A specialist subject that moves us away from the Zen simplicity that we are not living out the ideas that are in everybodys heads. They may not be either consciousness or false consciousness, they may just be only us. This idea would save a lot of bloodletting.

Back to Miracles for a moment...

'The most important tool the artist fashions...is faith in their ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Art must be miraculous: the instant it is completed, the intimacy between the creation and the creator is ended. They are an outsider. Art must be for them, as for anyone, experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need'
Mark Rothko, The Romantics Were Prompted (1947)

Typed up to keep us on the old straight Exodus track lest we end up in a white cube believing ourselves to be the miracle...

Writing on walls during the cold weather...

Another classic from the maestro of the pithy one-liner, my man, Louis Ferdinand Celine.

Victoria and Albert one Sunday afternoon...

Diane Arbus exhibition: The drooling of America

Babylondon - We Love It!!

'The return journey from the sanatorium afforded able time to think through and out the misery of 'As Long As Voyeurs In The Black Night Substitute Themselves For Seers...'. The horses went quite slowly over the barren ground and the driver was relaxed about our pace. We later entered the southern quarter of The City as dusk painted the cold and snappy streets with an array of autumnal colours quite cheering to the soul despite all the cold. I had amused myself now and again during the journey by reaching out of the window to try to catch leaves that were falling from the trees. With no pressure to collect or accumulate them, to store, catalogue or define them, I was able to keep up this diversion for minutes at a time when the burden of thinking about stuff become too much...At the porte-cochere, I paid the driver well and gathered up my bags of books, magazines and notepads and began once again to ascend to my lodging place, the Full Moon above creating a effervescent silver halo around the top of my Tower'
The Ruinist, Homelesshome (2005)

These days, it seems, that in order to be overwhelmed by the hypnosis and panic in the streets of London (and beyond), one doesn't even have to journey out of the house. Despite the past few days when The Ruinist had occasion to visit two galleries, three bookshops, a train station, four restaurants, two cafes and numerous shoe shops in the central district of London Town, it has mostly been in the house that the horrible question of over-consciousness has been springing up uninvited. Even the experience of trying to equip myself for another winter with some kind of waterproof boot or shoe by trekking down Oxford Street, the highpoint of London no-places, was not as dastardly as the random arrival of pain-filled facts and jarring lived experiences that come to reside in my head through my own mere act of living (in my hermit's cave).

I'm having problems with the issue of political consciousness and it's a problem in the same way that I have a problem of a unstoppable water leak in my house. It gets in the way of my everyday flow. It's there and everything's likely to go mouldy. As someone who is interested in politics because of how I live, that is to say, I am poor, I am one of those political animals that you can see on any metropolitan safari.

Unhappilly, the political animal is a wounded beast. In permanent exile from their fellow animals who live seemingly spontaneously dealing with or not dealing with the joys or blows of the everyday. In permanent exile from self-relaxation because every action, interaction, inaction is conscious of social relations, because they see what they don't really want to see. At their best, the animals inspire because, well...they just are! Beautiful human beings, without an instant response, without always having the name of who is to blame, without judgement to lay at the heads of those of trangress, without bitter fury or loveless love. But that is a rare species of wounded beast. Mostly they are quite tedious...

Consciousness (Version)
The problem of consciousness over false consciousness is one of the nastiest sinkholes in political theory or action. Conscious? Unconscious? Falsely conscious? It's obviously bullshit. 'These ideas are in everyone's heads', my utopian impulse clings to. This translates as 'everything will be alright in the end', a fine notion especially if the weight of living isn't too pressing, no death squad at your door, no problem of starvation wages or slave indenture. So we slouch towards communism, despite it all, because of the contradictions. But ouch!, those contradictions! I'm much better these days at not involving myself in misery-inducing internal monologues about the kind of itchy conversations you overhear in London, or the kind of interactions you witness in shoe shops, cafes, galleries, on the bus or as you ride a bicycle. I'm not moralistically inclined to put what seems like people's increasing banality, role-plays or lack of human understanding into the category of 'false consciousness', because I see that people remain human most (or at least some?) of the time. It's not a question of education, propaganda, activism to raise the consciousness of the masses, the famous masses. It's only a hope against pessimism, against despairing. It's hope against the details of that mobile phone conversation you overheard, that car driver who didn't take care, that neighbour who's violent, that shopper who expects too much from the worker, that bureaucratic rule, that loud drunken yuppie Friday night in The City, that racist older person in the lift who assumes affinity with you. It's believing in slow decency of humans against fast-track world that increases the spaces between us all, and worse, has us believe that we are individually all our own countries, our own economies, our own celebrity, own historians. Is it any one of our faults. Can we point the finger at any of us? I try not to.

But the world's going to shit! The political beast unearths all the details and rolls around in increasing piles of facts of who is doing which horrible things to who and why. Conscious of the essential bad guys and gals and also the redeeming good guys and gals. Then the question arises..don't people know what's going on? In Palestine, in Congo, with the Kalahari's, the Ogoni, the Mapuche, in Iceland, in Poland, in Chechnya, in Brixton, the Kurds, the Tibetans, the...

But all of the above seems increasingly visible yet made invisible at the same time. Any flick through a Sunday 'quality' newspaper seems like an inventory of 'false consciousness'. Famine next to fine cheese, celebrity next to poverty. It's not well rounded and informative, it's rounded-off and infotainment. Flick the pages...images, adverts, faces, places, words all words. Nothing here seems particularly difficult or obtuse. This is not a subtle analysis.

So, I do not even have to travel far to see how the world lives. Genuine global village idiot that I am, these are the troubles that now arrive in my refuge, my monk's cell, my Tower: I pick up a newspaper or a free magazine and bring it home. I try to listen to 'alternative' Resonance FM but it's dumbed down. I watch my manic neighbours and aggresive locals out of the window as I type this. I am phoned up by busineses, sent credit card offers and legal threats about my non-existant TV. A free 'style magazine' called Living South is dropped through my letter box, as is The Mayor of London's paper, as is the Liberal Democrat's Focus newsheet. In none of these intrusions can I find what's in my head. These intrusions exist in time and space as a nowhere. I stumble and curse but still I can find no edge to this Colony.

'...I will not sign a peace treaty with the world on your backs...Resitant reason, you will not prevent me casting, absurdly, upon the waters drifiting on the tides of my thirst, your form, deformed islands, your end, my defiance...'

Aime Cesaire, from Notebook of a Return To My Native Land (1938)

Our Exodus...

As I sit here looking at out the window thinking and typing about all my stuff, my neighbour is outside leaning on my windowsill, two foot away. She is nervous and looks miserable. Another woman joins her and they talk. Now they go off together, my neighbour going to get her stuff.

As Long As Voyeurs In The Black Night Substitute Themselves For Seers..

'These remarks are addressed to those who do not know that in art there is no great expedition which is not undertaken at the risk of one's life; that the road to be followed is obviously not the one flanked by guard rails...I declare myself for the minority which is ceaselessly renewable and which acts as a lever. My greatest ambition is to insure the continuation after me of the theoretical significance of this minority'
Andre Breton, Prolegomena to a Third Manifesto of Surrealism or Else (1942)

If we are going to have to deal with proclamations then I prefer the lowly no-sense scream of punk or the echoing rightious silence of dub to any latterday manifesto, artistic, political or otherwise.
Despite the past and it's glorious but lingering manifestos, there is now only one manifesto and we live inside of it. It's a reality that's lived in the super extreme. A one reality made explicitly manifest and total by its lack of edges. It's a manifesto written for or by the already persuaded. In this realm, with one of our concern being to create ourselves out of here and towards freedom, there comes back fast at us, the Reality Manifesto. Two examples -

For the pure thrill of Being, I ran into the Diesal Wall on the old WWW. It's a marketing project of the clothes brand essentially bunging up people's submitted creations onto large walls that they have commandeered for their public advert. The first was in Madrid, the second in Berlin. The third no doubt will be in Coventry. Accompanying the Diesel Wall is, of course, 'The Manifesto', of which samples follow here:

'To bring contemporary art to your fellow citizens'
'To locate a vibrant artistic presence that represents the Zeitgeist'
'To fit current modes of visual expression to the medium of a show'
Et cetera...

This mode of expression has been being explored for rather a long time now. It's called grafitti (Zeus is a cunt etc). My favourite of these sentences, created quite randumbly by the project managers through a liberal sprinking of sexy words from the Box of Now onto the blank pages of fashion magazines, is -

'To present art as a new visual entertainment'

This seems to sum up the present state of art and it's discontents. My main theme here then is that what used to be some kind contradictory activity, whether learnt in the art school or in the school yard, now appears only to function as a bright and shiny this-day's-thing in the previously defined Manifesto as Reality. It's all entertaining isn't it? What was possibly a liberation or shock to the system, has passed away into living dead culture as mould left on our hands and faces. This art-as-thing, as culture before it's even cultured, as 'ART; just so you know it is, is truly miserable.

Coming across my path, but you can find such printed matter on your own by going, for example, to The Pineal Eye, Broadwick St, London (and I use this example correspondingly), are tens of free or paid-for magazines filled with urban and street-innovated art as adverts. These rotting mega-adverts are empty of anything that doesn't have a price label attached to it. Each article is about some product or another. If the thing is not itself the star, then someone's memories of good times, someone's emotional response to good music, someone's bad time will only really be a slight of hand advert for more things. Compulsively I pick them up and my hands mildew slightly. I pick them up because I'm attracted to the visual, for what's erotic and seductive about photography and design as it tries to represent the life around us. I pick them up because they are free. I pick them up to revolt myself. I pick them up to learn something...about where I am and how we are living (and maybe to see or feel how we might be living). I pick them up because I can't escape the notion of cool and how I might be cool via association with something I found out here or by the type of clothes I might wear. Always the utopian trace inherent in creative practice tries to escape the confines of the magazines: that life could be erotic and seductive in its own image. That we have a shared visual (common)sense of being. That the basis of 'cool' could be (but rarely is in this context) an understanding that the outsider prevails, that we will win.

My own (or only) fatal strategy for dealing with this magazines is to suspend them in my house with my own grafitti writ large. This, I have found is incredibly satisfying. Satisfying in the sense of trying to turn around the creative acts that made up the journal but more so because, like the best grafitti, there's a sense of madness contained in the act. It's scrawl, often doggeral from fragments of my life and mind/body. On the pictured occasion, I sutured the sides as a wise precaution, just to keep it all in isolation, just in case.This is just my scream. It is not a Manifesto

Cass Arts, a business in the business of selling art materials, are running a promotion right now called 'The Manifesto'. The bottom line for Cass is that 'art is freedom' especially if we buy our paintbrushes from them. The Cass Manifesto screams 'Let's fill this town with artists!'. Here, I get to indulge my two favourite quotes that I endlessly repeat. Both come from misanthropic but almost-Utopian writers and reveal, despite the far above, my long-suffering disdain for artists.

'People are so bored that artists have been posted at every corner as a precaution'
Louis-Ferdinand Celine

'Arty types: no principles!'
William Burroughs

This seems to sum up well the devilish pact that is entertained by the 'voyeurs' of Rwanda, Fallujah, Jenin, New Orleans - graphic designers, artists and photographers in the production of these moudy magazines, each one not even bumping up against a guard rail. It's all smooth. It also seems to sum up well the Manifesto of Reality that passes for creative acts in London Town. Having recently seen so much NOTHING, so many INVISIBLE yet present art works in galleries, I wonder what is going on towards our Exodus. Let's face it, the most powerful manifesto we can offer contains one statement - Not that capitalism isn't very nice but that CAPITALISM IS BORING. Can we not risk our lives as simply or as dangerously we might risk one kiss? Once again, it feels like this...

'We have come full circle. But backwards? The line between the end beginning and the beginning of the end has inverted and I proceed backwards from there to here and now and then. Or is it the other way around?'
Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Gentlemen (2003)

Art has to be blag and there is a difference between blagging and begging.

The Impossible

Is the pursuit of anti-politics a ghost or chimera? A phantasy? Like the runaway train and its runaway followers in China Mieville's interesting communist fantasy novel 'Iron Council'. Will we walk away from power only to be faced by it finally coming at us in the other direction? Then what? Return along the same tracks we left on?

Exodus: From Here to Nowhere

'The key to political action (or rather the only possibility of extracting it from its present state of paralysis) consists in developing the publicness of Intellect outside of Work, and in opposition to it...I use the term Exodus here to define mass defection from the State, the alliance between general intellect and political Action, and a movement toward the public sphere of Intellect. The term is not at all conceived as some defensive existential strategy, quite the contrary: Exodus is a full-fledged model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics. Today, a realm of common affairs has to be defined from scratch. Any such definition must draw out the opportunities for liberation that are to be found in taking command of this novel interweaving among Work, Action, and Intellect, which up until now we have only suffered. Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very idea of "republic," however, requires a taking leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no longer State. The political action of the Exodus consists in an engaged withdrawal'

Paolo Virno, Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus, 1990's

 
'Delinked from the production of surplus value, Intellect becomes the matrix of a non-State Republic. The breeding ground of Disobedience consists of the social conflicts that manifest themselves not only and not so much as protest, but most particularly as defection, not as "voice" but as "exit". Nothing is less passive than flight. The "exit" modifies the conditions within which the conflict takes place, rather than presupposes it as an irremovable horizon; it changes the context within which a problem arises, rather than deals with the problem by choosing one or another of the alternative solutions already on offer. The "exit" can be seen as a free-thinking inventiveness that changes the rules of the game and disorients the enemy. Defection stands at the opposite pole to the desperate notion of "You have nothing to lose but your chains." It is postulated, rather, on the basis of a latent wealth, on an abundance of possibilities...'

Paolo Virno, Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus

 
'There are regions that remain outside the reach of reality, that cannot be approached, that are utterly unrecognised. There are words that are unpronounceable because they lack 'signification', perceptions that are impossible, things that cannot be seen; thus, there are screens. This is the aspect that I call 'Dada-reality': reality insofar as the fabric that holds it together is missing. It is obviously in these regions where something is lacking, either the transformative experience or the words to exchange (because they are impossible to say), that works of art can take place'.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, Notes On The Critical Function of The Work Of Art, 1970
 


Pulled back by strange forces into a world of art that I had left in 1997, I'm tempted here to crush together two possible escape routes: that it may be possible to escape this dreary century and start again via a strategy (a lived experience) of anti-politics, the above-described Exodus, and, that one useful tactic may be found in the forbidden realm of art, or at least in our miraculous human facility for creativity. Forbidden because we have lost 'art' to the artists and thus to the reigning power.

Indeed it is in the notion of 'The Miracle' that I place that laboured explosion, the spontaneous making and doing, the production of un-mediated objects, created things, the alchemical wonders of letting our hands do the talking as we construct 'art'. A miracle because we become gods for one moment as we sculpt and meld, layer and incise, collage and create circuits of meaning and non-meaning in our artistic endeavours. Paulo Virno, citing Hannah Arendt's theory of the miracle in political action, has written that 'Action has something of the miracle given that it shares the miracle's quality of being surprising and unexpected...insurrections, desertions, invention of new organisms of democracy...herein lie the Miracles of the Multitude, and these miracles do not cease when the sovereign power forbids them'. Our artistic practices, free from the pitfall of the gallery treadmill, the culterati, the profiteer or the psychoanalyst, might indeed be a exit point for our non-confrontation with Capital, our desertion or lack of interest. As skirmish or attack (guerilla-style), seeking neither victories nor thus power, we create through creations new forms of communication between ourself (our multiferious personalities), and ourselves (in the chaotic social but coherent human realm). This mode of communication is the continuous creation of other languages, more grasped at than understood, more internal than picaresque, but always a moment of sharing and being together. The content of this 'art' is probably similar to how we humans 'hear' birdsong, we may understand it in the totality without actually understanding it.

As 'art' (made by all), as anti-knowledge, this necessarily involves what Raoul Vaneigem would call 'purity of gesture', meaning that we relate to each other genuinely, forgiving mistakes, confusions and pulls of the ego or the role. That is quite delightful. If it seems like we will need 'a miracle' to get out and away from the capitalist colonies that we live in, then what could be better than an explosion of unexpected but awaited-for individualised/collectivised miracles?

This artistic free communication could be one basis for our walking away from power alongside other devices and dreams in more conventional modes. Not conventional as in petitioning for change or asking for political favours, but conventional like the free exchange of things and ideas, Potlatch and gift-giving, permanent Carnival without a King, the establishment of zones of desertion like how utopian social centres could be, like how free and easy occupied buildings and land could be, like how anti-power could be, like how...how...

We dream of Exodus, as put into practice maybe, for example by elements in the Italian Movements of '77. We dream history, histories. We dream nightmare and weep for the undead, the dead and the dying. We despise mealy-mouthed activist-types, all knowing and rational in the face of an irrational Armageddon. Our Exodus is based in the sensing of the impossible, of surreality, 'dada-reality', unknown drives and desires but is also based on the known depth of what is missing. The miserly nature of political activism, an excess of accounting and box ticking, cannot be of any use any more. An Exit set against such political austerity looms (and is gimpsed across the world). All talk of Economy is dead talk for we seek the live explosion of consciousness that seems like a look through the mirror of power, needing the Third Eye of Anti-Politics, in some senses being something like this:

'The eye, at the summit of of the skull, opening in incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in its sinister solitude, is not a product of the understanding, but is an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head, instead of locking up life as money is locked in a safe, spends it without counting, for, at the end of this erotic metamorphosis, the head receives the electric power of points. This great burning head is the image and disagreeable light of the notion of expenditure, beyond the still empty notion as it is elaborated on the basis of methodical analysis'.

Georges Bataille, in 'The Pineal Eye', 1930

Exile Affinity Group expands...

'Why does not gold, which is eighteen times heavier than aqua regia, collect at the bottom of the vessel containing the aqua regia? Can you not see clearly that, between each particle of gold and aqua regia, there is a force by virtue of which they seek out each other, are united and join each other?'

Hermannus Boerhave, in Elemanta Chemiae, 1724

'Affinity is the force that makes these heterogeneous entities form a union, a kind of marriage, a chemical wedding, arising more from love than from hate'

Michel Lowy, Redemption and Utopia, 1988

'Seek each other out, attract each other and seize...each other, and then suddenly reappear again out of this intimate union , and come forward in fresh, unexpected form'

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Elective Affinities, 1809

The massive technological pile-up called The Internet creates monsters in its own backyard. I don't know if this is a result of use or misuse of the machine? The electronic swapping of our monstrosities has been good for me. I'm not sure if I know what I have found in this experiment so far but it seems like a secret shared by all who are partaking in it. Yet it also seems like a secret shared by all that remains still secret or unknown. This chemical wedding may be another step taken on the way out of here.

'The day will soon come when we realise that, in spite of the wear and tear of life that bites like acid into our flesh, the very cornerstone of that violent liberation which reaches out for a better life in the heart of the technological ages that corrupts our cities is love. Only love remains beyond the realm of that which our imagination can grasp, dominating the deepness of the wind, the well full of diamonds, the constructions of the spirit and the logic of the flesh. The problem created by the bankruptcy of our emotions, intimately linked with the problem of capitalism, has not yet been resolved...'

Andre Breton, Manifesto on 'L'Age d'or', 1931

This WuWuWu love against hate may well be another step taken on the way out of here. I hope so.

 

From One Thing to The Next Thing

The Internet posting thing spreads its weary tentacles further enabling realms of communication that are at once fascinatingly novel but also unevenly open, or more so full of pain and sadness.
But everything is neutral..except in the arms of your lover(s) or in arms with your comrades (a dream)...

Here The Ruinist (trying not to ruin too much) begans once again to post on the crest of a wave...to re-begin on a new thread, inspired (once again) by the ever-tangling threads that we are weaving here...

Next topic (maybe)...Aesthetics + Art + the desire to grasp the Anti-Politics of the times....and my back to the future ventures in the creeped-out world of The Gallery.

Give up Art to fully realise it. Live a little so that you can go much easier on yourself.