boredom is always counter-revolutionary


JG Ballard, RIP
April 20, 2009, 12:08 am
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I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.

I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.

I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their disheveled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon’s knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion.

I believe in pain.

I believe in despair.

I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.

I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.

‘What I believe’, JG Ballard 1984

ballard

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The Situationists and Council Communism
April 15, 2009, 4:58 pm
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One result of the Situationist International’s program of anti-specialisation is that their work has some degree of relevancy to a diverse range of fields. As such, the SI is generally approached from one of these fields – architecture and urbanism, avant-garde aesthetics, (post-)Marxist traditions etc. – and attempts at conceptualising the SI in its heterogeneous and shifting totality are replaced by prismatic understandings of the group, which can serve to replicate the specialisation it originally sought to counteract.

Recently, there have been some efforts to render more fully an interpretation of the SI beyond the dominant image of Guy Debord’s post-1963 theory-based politico cell. MacKenzie Wark, for example, has emphasised the importance of other members of the SI at this time (Jorn, Constant, Gallizio, Bernstein), whilst also offering an alternative characterisation of Debord himself, now cast as strategist of war. Stewart Home has previously attempted to redress the unbalance of attention paid to this predominantly Parisian group compared to the 2nd Situationist International in Scandinavia, centred around de Jong and Nash.

Despite this unconsolidated historical identity, what has remained dominant is an impression of the SI that treats them as aestheticians prior to political theorists. Although they are recognised for their novel and prescient theoretical contributions, these are often introduced as the basis to a more rigorous analysis of the SI’s aesthetic tactics: ‘détournement’ and the ‘dérive’ after all, offer clear avenues of development, unlike the dead-end and negation of individual agency of ‘the spectacle’. Elsewhere, the SI are cast as endlessly oppositional (which isn’t an unfair conclusion to be taken perhaps from Debord’s later writings): resistant to the spectacularised forms of Western party politics, the politics of everyday life, the bureaucratic state capitalism of so-called actually existing socialism, as well as the reification of much contemporary Marxist opposition. What is often overlooked, however, is their (admittedly few and underdeveloped) moments of positive political alignment: their proposals for what the inverse of spectacular society could look like. Their supported political program was one of council communism.

This form of fervently anti-hierarchical communist organisation is most commonly association with the short-lived Hungarian revolution of 1956, when local revolutionary councils sprung up independently of party or union authority. The journal Socialisme ou Barbarie (to which Debord briefly contributed) and Cornelius Castoriadis (Paul Cardan) would seem to have been influential on the SI in this respect; and many of the principles of councilist organisation were put into use by the SI during May ‘68, with their involvement in the Council for the Maintenance of Occupations (CMDO).

What I plan to do with this post is keep a rolling record of references to and elaborations of council communism from the Internationale Situationniste and the writings of individual situationists, to be accompanied eventually by some sort of overview or critique that may (or may not) form the basis of an image of the SI as grounded in a positive political program, in addition or contrast to their current image as free-floating agents of negation. Any contributions or criticisms would be greatly appreciated.

Excerpts begin below

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Ian Tomlinson Video
April 7, 2009, 8:34 pm
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In the hope that this will receive mainstream news coverage and be investigated accordingly: the Guardian have released the video of Ian Tomlinson’s last minutes, whereupon he is attacked from behind by a copper, with a notable absence of the hurling missiles and cider-drenched anarchists that originally featured in the Met-Tabloid version of events. Suddenly, all the cameras at the demonstrations seem entirely justified.

g20-death-footage-scene-3-001

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The G20 Pantomime
April 2, 2009, 11:21 am
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I’ve tried previously to say something on the futility of the dominant form of contemporary protest – essentially, as allowing someone better armed than yourself to start a fight, and enjoying the pantomime-style retaliation – and the G20 demonstrations did nothing to convince me otherwise. One positive, perhaps, is that the media will now pay attention to the police tactic of kettling and pre-emptive aggression moreso than before; but at the same time, the opposition and dissent represented by the demonstration is obscured by arguments about the pragmatics of protesting. Whatever the causes of death of the poor man who died yesterday, one can only hope that it will be recognised that he died whilst penned in with thousands of others, refused safe exit, and denied access to food, water or a toilet.

Some useful perspectives on this form of demonstration:

This could explain what I’ve seen at one protest after another, where peaceful demonstrations turn into ugly rucks only when the police attack. The wildly disproportionate and unnecessary violence I’ve sometimes seen the police deploy could scarcely be better designed to provoke a reaction… By planting the idea in the public mind that the streets could erupt into catastrophic violence at any time, were it not for the thick blue line thrown around even the mildest protest, they establish the need for a heavy police presence. George Monbiot

I’m still not clear on what the strategy is behind these mini-spectacles. It’s great to see thousands of people turn out to protest against capitalism, despite all the media hysteria and off-putting threats from the police. We need far bigger protests in the future, ideally coinciding with a general strike or something. But it seems as if the idea at the moment is to have a carnivalesque parade, wind up in one spot and get penned in only to have the police mess with you if you try to have a drink or some weed. I don’t want to be a negative nelly, but that’s not reclaiming the streets, it’s getting owned by the cops. Lenin’s Tomb

Time to withdraw from the feelgood simulation of politics. Time to give up the gratification of displaying wounds inflicted by the police as signs of grace, evidence that we are on the side of the Good. Time to relinquish the easy jouissance of impotent acting-out. Time to face the fact that organising marches isn’t the same as political organisation. K-Punk

Any sense that The City might feel slightly contrite after directly creating the direst financial crisis in 70 years seemed decidedly premature, reading this collection of missives. Some advice for letter writers and those writing the imaginary letters – avoid describing protesters as ’scroungers’ when banks have just received the biggest injection of state largesse (or ‘taxpayers’ money’) in world history; don’t claim we ‘don’t understand economics’ when it’s clear, with your preposterous attempts to prop up an entire economy on finance and property, that you know even less; and don’t sneer at the ‘unemployed’ when your own actions have created a rate of unemployment at 2 million and counting. It rankles, somewhat. Sit down man…

It’s unlikely the media coverage will focus on the peaceful Climate Camp activities. It’s also very likely the police will be allowed to blame troublemakers without having to explain why they deliberately hemmed people in and would not allow them to leave – aggravating the crowds. With more free movement, we doubt there would have been any tension to boil over. But protestors are easy targets for the media to stereotype, and today will be no different. Rowenna Davis and Sunny Hundal at the Guardian CiF

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G20 Answers
April 1, 2009, 4:19 pm
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spectacle

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