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...
Comments
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yes well
16.03.2006 20:45
Or it would help to not think about the other people, like yourselves, who are part of the web of social relationships which is capitalism as people “who don’t die because they are already dead” or the people who live in buildings as “the prisoners of the omnipresent world order”. Or thought as “vomit”.
I don’t pretend to have read the books but I am familiar with the message. One of the most important things about life is communication and interaction with other people but you deny “them” the same status of feeling and thinking that you prioritise for yourself (unless presumeably “the prisoners” agree with you).
“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”.
What do you mean by ‘heaving populations’? It’s a term that is very emotive and you are using it in a negative sense. Heaving populations are people like you and they may well give a shit about whats happening and you should not so easily dispise what people try and do to fight even if you see it as sucking up to politicians etc etc… What people do is living, looking after their kids, seeing the city or the country, working cause that’s the ‘choice’ most of us have got. I agree with you that there should be a different way of living, that life shouldn’t be as it is in a capitalist economy, but you could start by recognising that “those people” are not so different from you. And be a little less scathing about the lives people lead.
If and when climate change gets worse then we should be thinking about how we are going to support migration. Walking around looking at the flowers and going arrrgh at buildings that aren't what you want isn't going to do anything. It might you feel better about not doing your essay but thats not really the point is it?
Ultimately, we are here for each other. If you don't understand that, you don't understand anything. I wasn't going to answer this but I am tired of seeing these ideas unchallenged. Other people are not 'other' people. ffs.
heather
Suggestions...
17.03.2006 01:12
Firstly, this an 'extract' from what you consider to be a 'short pamphlet'?! In that case the finished version will surely be a behemoth. People won't read it unless you keep it short.
Secondly, it's too pretentious. Far too "studenty". And although you use long words and fancy sources, it doesn't read particularly well either - no logical progression. Keep it simple. If you intend people to read and be moved by it then the last thing you want to do is alienate your audience.
Thirdly, have some respect for your reader. They probably see the world more clearly than you think. If you wish to advocate change give a well-reasoned arguement. Don't insult them.
The fact that you want to convince people to change things for the better is certainly commendable. But you don't propose how they can achieve this. I'm sorry to say, but currently this reads like a project in self-indulgence and without a drastic rewrite it will not fulfill its aims.
Adam.
e-mail:
yellow_grinch@hotmail.com
dfg
17.03.2006 13:35
they were very precise, i think its a shame you cant call someone a cock on indymedia (who obviously is one)
( i suppose this will get taken down too, probably by THE MAN, sheesh, i hate the man.)
dfg
reply
17.03.2006 16:06
''What people do is living, looking after their kids, seeing the city or the country, working cause that’s the ‘choice’ most of us have got. I agree with you that there should be a different way of living, that life shouldn’t be as it is in a capitalist economy, but you could start by recognising that “those people” are not so different from you. And be a little less scathing about the lives people lead''
I agree with this! That is the point: that it should not be this way but it is...
And of course i know i am absolutly no different in that i DO have a job, and will almost certainly always have to work, pay bills etc unless i intend to become homeless...
It is interesting how it doesnt have to be this way as such: The workers movement in Argentinia saw occupation of the factories; distribution of power and decisions among the workers, and fair self-determined wages.
It does worry us that you, and therefore i guess others, appear to imply we are distancing ourselves: we did actually try to avoid this. And we are not therefore attacking anyone, simply the way of life we have let ourselves become comfortable in - to the point of compliance. I cannot, i am afraid, see how we can justify our western way of life while people starve under our noses.
''heaving populations'' simply meant that the earth is over populated, and environmently cannot sustain our modern wasteful, way of life (developed countrys)..
Certainly nothing controversial or worth analysing there!
And again ''vomit'' has been over-analysed
''Ultimately, we are here for each other. If you don't understand that, you don't understand anything.'' And this point is unbelievable! Why does anyone think we would actually give our time to something like this unless we are attempting to cause people to unite on these problems. The problems will not change unless we do actually do something rather than just talk.
We actually wanted people to contribute... its not much but everything has to start somewhere...
2...
Thankyou for your advice! It is a first attempt so we are going to have to change stuff and learn from mistakes, and comments like these.
My flatmate said it wasnt pretentious but nevermind, i guess people are going to see it differently.
'Thirdly, have some respect for your reader. They probably see the world more clearly than you think. If you wish to advocate change give a well-reasoned arguement. Don't insult them.'
We definetly do have respect for our readers, i hate to think it could come across any other way: so we're going to have to think about this, and think more about how it comes across...
holly
e-mail:
les.seuls.createurs@hotmail.com