This is an extract of a short pamphlet written in January 2006 detailing some thoughts on our current situation. This situation has remained intact for at least a hundred years past. It is not news as such but clearly is still very much a cause of great concern and will not go away as long as we are ignorant and compliant. A friend and I wrote this as the beginnings of a potential movement of discontent in Manchester and the world. We despise consumerism, our revolting spectacle society and the banality of modern life and the modern slave. We are inspired by the Lettrists, situationists, Dadaism etc. This is to be continued…
To the citizen of eyesore world this is for you.
We are young and (at the time of writing) alive. We feel ashamed at most things our five senses are regularly exposed to. We have no prospects do you?
We are lost walking down streets with road names and landmarks. We can see maps marked with churches and schools and motorways, but we have been indoctrinated and have lost faith.
Where do we go from here?
Manipulation and passivity is driving us towards inevitable futures based on centuries of overall compliance and ‘not in my back yard’ tactics. Leftovers from the last hundreds of generations.
Where do we go from here? Not towards anything at all but away from. We were all born with a clear starting point and a set of lungs, lanterns gleaming in the distance, yet no finishing target. Distorted perspectives. This is we, living with every emphasis imaginable being on a justified finishing point (if these are on a shelf with full stops, roads, circles, pension schemes and profit graphs. Art produced for purchase and inevitable museum relics, archives of forgotten lives as name checks and static). It is like squeezing into a whalebone corset. We can’t breathe.
When was the last time we lost track of time or wanted to?
Sometimes it hurts to get out of bed in the morning faced with more wasted time and objective decisions. In the name of neutrality we are bland faceless organisms, one way streets striving to move the other way and, in the back of our bruised minds, knowing it is all trickery to begin with.
And we do have a lot of time on our hands, but the part we don’t sell we do not know what to do with. People tell us to get drunk and forget. Sober up for part-time work and essay deadlines and meanwhile unwittingly catch glimpses of that which we were trying to escape.
Now is the time to confront everything escapism temporarily heals and abolish every last ounce.
This is not the interim.
A dictatorship based on convenience is more powerful than one based on government authority. So ruled by ourselves and our fears there is less reason to revolt or feel revolted by action we deem ordinary. Who needs revolution when we have alarm clocks to make the noise? Or personal music to block out unsuitable surroundings. Or umbrellas, warm buildings and poverty induced death a thousand miles away and a thousand million cries away.
Noise travels faster through water perhaps the bottom of the ocean knows something we do not so far.
We are starring in the face of easy ways out and legitimacy overriding a fear of hatred towards those before us and those around us who felt desensitised, indoctrinated and numb. The spaces in between have left a million possibilities but have already been bought. The rights to every creation ever have been bought traded or rendered disposable in a place where immortality is so desirable.
The fear of lack of ownership as loss of freedom and loss of rights has caused us to buy everything we can afford. But almost entirely in small watery doses. So we are still where we always were. Rooms filled with relics of our claimed personality and ‘keep off the grass’ signs keeping us off the grass. We the most destructive parasite time has ever known judging each other on how much has been acquired and destroyed. A one sided discussion, what about how much we don’t want and thoughts as vomit measured in measuring jugs.
Are we aware of ‘the incompatibility of our programme as expression, with the available means of expression and perception’ [Kotanyi, the next stage]?
Perhaps every difficult situation such as a lack of choice world is based overwhelmingly on language and communication as restrictive forms of expression. Forced to express within a set alphabet and numerical order, when we have feelings that fail to find a coherent expression, they are more likely to be forgotten and pushed aside as irrational. And again and ironically if language can do this to us but a total lack of coherence would find us clinging to the nearest strong vertical proof-of-existence-tree then where do we have left to turn?
Dialogue, TV’s, and an abundance of nothingness and emptiness that is infused in us all. Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, ‘we will breathe later’. And most of them don’t die because they are already dead. It has been said that all that once was directly lived has become mere representation. It is true. We do not live anymore, it has become an abstract concept. Commute, work, commute, sleep. Infinite. We forgot what we
should have been doing, listening to empty churches humming at dawn, watching the yellow bird perched atop of cognitive thought, it has no face but dances and sings. It simply makes a joyous noise, because it can. Like a cacophony of white noise accompanied by light, on a lens.
Nature created neither servants or masters. We want neither to rule or to be ruled. Forget your social policy, the impassioned member of parliament, his drive for social change. No re-plastering, the structure is rotten. Masochism today takes the form of reformism. We want a wild and ephemeral music. We propose a fundamental regeneration: concert strikes, sound gathering with collective investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone. Be creative, it is in our nature. ‘You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star’ (Nietzsche). We all bear that chaos, it is in the degradation of our existence, the meaningless exchanges we make everyday.
Sink back, brush the wind out of your hair and ask yourself ‘why am I doing this?’ But constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints. These are our lives. Do not ask if you may live them, or even demand. Simply do it.
The problem comes when people ask ‘but what can we do?’ the answer? Anything! It is all too easy to hide one’s face in anguish when confronted with the state of our world, to ignore it or to put it in some far away place or time, cleansing ourselves of all negativity. In some cases it may even be desirable, to protect your family, your job, your sanity. Such thinking is, as Adorno, puts it ‘in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.’ It is against such suppression of pain that these words are directed. Do not ignore it. Let it tear you apart, wreak chaos inside of you and it will give rise to the passion needed to rid our world of those who have raped it and destroyed it.
Passion. I do not see it. It comes to me from nowhere and it fills me with joy that I still have one way in which to subvert, and it is subversive. It is free and explosive and they have almost gotten rid of it. We should be making love in the poli Sci classrooms, as well as the streets, the fields. It is one of the few revolutionary arms we have left, and it is the most liberating. When they destroy passion they have destroyed the little humanity we have left in us.
‘The more I make love the more I want to make the revolution, the more I make the revolution the more I want to make love.’ (May ‘68). We must keep it alive.
In the words of Chtcheglov ‘We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.’
Is architecture important? Of course it is. It is the ‘simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams.’
The boring and staid surroundings in which we live have numbed us and our imaginations have decayed within the gulag that is the modern city. The buildings which surround us do not engage our imagination. They are the brutal and imposing lackeys of an ever pervasive system, housing the prisoners of the omnipresent world order. We do not see them, we just feel their breath on our necks and it is enough for us to continue, scared, on our fruitless journey. Detourn them, attack them they do nothing for you.
Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.
Over saturation of everything is causing us all to become as throwaway as the next person. Heaving populations, free markets under neoliberalism, integration and globalisation. Change being lost to warped perspective. Striving to gain individuality (ultimately through what we own or want) is viewed as more important than collective policy refusal. Yet if everything, even psychoanalysis and curtain design has been used for somebody else somewhere before (something we may despise) individuality is already a foreign and spectacle concept. We follow or strive away from tradition and convention. A behaviour and appearance under an ideology, or their alternative presented as the only alternative. What if the other way was through an end to the stream? Blips like Morse code rather than a chain of continuousness and predictability.
Hold your glasses up to a flurry of waste and oblivion. Or take a wrong turn...
We are young and (at the time of writing) alive. We feel ashamed at most things our five senses are regularly exposed to. We have no prospects do you?
We are lost walking down streets with road names and landmarks. We can see maps marked with churches and schools and motorways, but we have been indoctrinated and have lost faith.
Where do we go from here?
Manipulation and passivity is driving us towards inevitable futures based on centuries of overall compliance and ‘not in my back yard’ tactics. Leftovers from the last hundreds of generations.
Where do we go from here? Not towards anything at all but away from. We were all born with a clear starting point and a set of lungs, lanterns gleaming in the distance, yet no finishing target. Distorted perspectives. This is we, living with every emphasis imaginable being on a justified finishing point (if these are on a shelf with full stops, roads, circles, pension schemes and profit graphs. Art produced for purchase and inevitable museum relics, archives of forgotten lives as name checks and static). It is like squeezing into a whalebone corset. We can’t breathe.
When was the last time we lost track of time or wanted to?
Sometimes it hurts to get out of bed in the morning faced with more wasted time and objective decisions. In the name of neutrality we are bland faceless organisms, one way streets striving to move the other way and, in the back of our bruised minds, knowing it is all trickery to begin with.
And we do have a lot of time on our hands, but the part we don’t sell we do not know what to do with. People tell us to get drunk and forget. Sober up for part-time work and essay deadlines and meanwhile unwittingly catch glimpses of that which we were trying to escape.
Now is the time to confront everything escapism temporarily heals and abolish every last ounce.
This is not the interim.
A dictatorship based on convenience is more powerful than one based on government authority. So ruled by ourselves and our fears there is less reason to revolt or feel revolted by action we deem ordinary. Who needs revolution when we have alarm clocks to make the noise? Or personal music to block out unsuitable surroundings. Or umbrellas, warm buildings and poverty induced death a thousand miles away and a thousand million cries away.
Noise travels faster through water perhaps the bottom of the ocean knows something we do not so far.
We are starring in the face of easy ways out and legitimacy overriding a fear of hatred towards those before us and those around us who felt desensitised, indoctrinated and numb. The spaces in between have left a million possibilities but have already been bought. The rights to every creation ever have been bought traded or rendered disposable in a place where immortality is so desirable.
The fear of lack of ownership as loss of freedom and loss of rights has caused us to buy everything we can afford. But almost entirely in small watery doses. So we are still where we always were. Rooms filled with relics of our claimed personality and ‘keep off the grass’ signs keeping us off the grass. We the most destructive parasite time has ever known judging each other on how much has been acquired and destroyed. A one sided discussion, what about how much we don’t want and thoughts as vomit measured in measuring jugs.
Are we aware of ‘the incompatibility of our programme as expression, with the available means of expression and perception’ [Kotanyi, the next stage]?
Perhaps every difficult situation such as a lack of choice world is based overwhelmingly on language and communication as restrictive forms of expression. Forced to express within a set alphabet and numerical order, when we have feelings that fail to find a coherent expression, they are more likely to be forgotten and pushed aside as irrational. And again and ironically if language can do this to us but a total lack of coherence would find us clinging to the nearest strong vertical proof-of-existence-tree then where do we have left to turn?
Dialogue, TV’s, and an abundance of nothingness and emptiness that is infused in us all. Meanwhile everyone wants to breathe and nobody can and many say, ‘we will breathe later’. And most of them don’t die because they are already dead. It has been said that all that once was directly lived has become mere representation. It is true. We do not live anymore, it has become an abstract concept. Commute, work, commute, sleep. Infinite. We forgot what we
should have been doing, listening to empty churches humming at dawn, watching the yellow bird perched atop of cognitive thought, it has no face but dances and sings. It simply makes a joyous noise, because it can. Like a cacophony of white noise accompanied by light, on a lens.
Nature created neither servants or masters. We want neither to rule or to be ruled. Forget your social policy, the impassioned member of parliament, his drive for social change. No re-plastering, the structure is rotten. Masochism today takes the form of reformism. We want a wild and ephemeral music. We propose a fundamental regeneration: concert strikes, sound gathering with collective investigation. Abolish copyrights: sound structures belong to everyone. Be creative, it is in our nature. ‘You must bear a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star’ (Nietzsche). We all bear that chaos, it is in the degradation of our existence, the meaningless exchanges we make everyday.
Sink back, brush the wind out of your hair and ask yourself ‘why am I doing this?’ But constraints imposed on pleasure incite the pleasure of living without constraints. These are our lives. Do not ask if you may live them, or even demand. Simply do it.
The problem comes when people ask ‘but what can we do?’ the answer? Anything! It is all too easy to hide one’s face in anguish when confronted with the state of our world, to ignore it or to put it in some far away place or time, cleansing ourselves of all negativity. In some cases it may even be desirable, to protect your family, your job, your sanity. Such thinking is, as Adorno, puts it ‘in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.’ It is against such suppression of pain that these words are directed. Do not ignore it. Let it tear you apart, wreak chaos inside of you and it will give rise to the passion needed to rid our world of those who have raped it and destroyed it.
Passion. I do not see it. It comes to me from nowhere and it fills me with joy that I still have one way in which to subvert, and it is subversive. It is free and explosive and they have almost gotten rid of it. We should be making love in the poli Sci classrooms, as well as the streets, the fields. It is one of the few revolutionary arms we have left, and it is the most liberating. When they destroy passion they have destroyed the little humanity we have left in us.
‘The more I make love the more I want to make the revolution, the more I make the revolution the more I want to make love.’ (May ‘68). We must keep it alive.
In the words of Chtcheglov ‘We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.’
Is architecture important? Of course it is. It is the ‘simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams.’
The boring and staid surroundings in which we live have numbed us and our imaginations have decayed within the gulag that is the modern city. The buildings which surround us do not engage our imagination. They are the brutal and imposing lackeys of an ever pervasive system, housing the prisoners of the omnipresent world order. We do not see them, we just feel their breath on our necks and it is enough for us to continue, scared, on our fruitless journey. Detourn them, attack them they do nothing for you.
Coming soon to this location: charming ruins.
Over saturation of everything is causing us all to become as throwaway as the next person. Heaving populations, free markets under neoliberalism, integration and globalisation. Change being lost to warped perspective. Striving to gain individuality (ultimately through what we own or want) is viewed as more important than collective policy refusal. Yet if everything, even psychoanalysis and curtain design has been used for somebody else somewhere before (something we may despise) individuality is already a foreign and spectacle concept. We follow or strive away from tradition and convention. A behaviour and appearance under an ideology, or their alternative presented as the only alternative. What if the other way was through an end to the stream? Blips like Morse code rather than a chain of continuousness and predictability.
Hold your glasses up to a flurry of waste and oblivion. Or take a wrong turn...
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