Well… I don’t even know where to begin…

From here.

On May 25th 1966, members of the Department of Philosophy at Peking University exhibited a poster they had produced that criticised the University management of counter-revolutionary actions and impeding the workers’ movement. Although the practise of producing large-scale, hand-written posters - called Dazibao, or Big Character Posters - dates to imperial times, the role of this form of public expression and political engagement would receive increased attention as the Cultural Revolution progressed. The University authorities initially suppressed the Department of Philosophy’s poster, called “What are Sung Shih, Lu Ping and Pen Pei-yun up to in the Cultural Revolution?”, although on June 1st Mao himself would approve the poster, as the country’s “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster”. Mao encouraged the dissemination of this practise, and produced his own poster entitled “Bombard the Headquarters“. An article in the People’s Daily of June 20th further encouraged the production of big-character posters, emphasising that they “concentrate in a single day twenty years’ education of the masses” and are “magic mirrors to show up monsters of all kinds”.

In line with the Third Worldism and explicitly Maoist tendencies of many French students and intellectuals of the 1960s, the issuing of big-character posters was repeated during the events of May ‘68, with the poster workshops also producing large and text-heavy Journals Murals to criticise de Gaulle and support striking students and workers. However there is also a parallel in the aftermaths of these sudden surges of publicised polemic and often very personal denunciations. Jack Chen’s Inside the Cultural Revolution reports on how Chen happily produced many big-character posters, until he learnt that the local Communist Party secretary “had been engaged in a vast provocation… they had been egging people on to criticise ‘whether you have all the evidence or not’ while keeping dossiers on all the critics” (1976, p233). Likewise, Raymond Marcellin, appointed Minister of the Interior in France on May 31th 1968, was to assemble “the most complete collection possible of the some 20, 000 tracts, documents, journals, and texts of the ‘68 movement” in order to mobilise the “massive police identification, classification, and roundup of all known gauchists and other militants” (Kristin Ross, May 68 and its Afterlives 2004, p61) that followed the events in France.

As entertainment for a Saturday afternoon, I really enjoyed this exhibition. It was busy, with lots of queuing and children crying and vying for attention, but I suspect that all this created an atmosphere much more suited to this type of event than hushed inspection and contemplation. The eleven installations that make up Psycho Buildings are to be experienced viscerally, even physically: infact, we could even go so far as to think of Psycho Buildings as an exhibition for children that adults happen to enjoy as well, like those animated films and fantasy novels that are deemed, I imagine, to have “crossover appeal”.

Most of this exhibition isn’t really things to look at and think about, but places to be (with, following the usual guidebook rhetoric, the ensuing revaluation of the environments we inhabit). Some of these places to be aren’t entirely unfamiliar, recreating spaces usually found at playgrounds and theme parks: Atelier Bow-Wow’s sheet-metal “Life Tunnel” and Ernesto Neto’s wooden-framed “Life Fog Frog…Fog Frog” could both be from a roadside service station’s kid’s area; whilst, a little more ambitious, Tomas Saraceno’s geodesic “Observatory, Air-Port-City” and Mike Nelson’s cinematic “To The Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, 1999” could be part of an elaborate queuing area for a ride at Alton Towers. I don’t mean to criticise these installations by drawing these comparisons: all of these are fun places to explore and clamber around, and making us feel young and excited is probably the best way to get us to “re-examine our ideas about the relationship between ourselves - our bodies and minds - and our surroundings”.

The other main category of installation at Psycho Buildings is more concerned with the minutiae of dwelling-spaces, appealing more to curiosity and a fine eye. Do Ho Suh’s “Fallen Star 1/5” and Rachel Whiteread’s “Place” both use doll’s houses as the means to dislocate the visitor from an embedded position within a home or a street, and give us a similar sense to how a child must feel with their toys, a contrasting sense of god-like control and humbling reverence for the fragility and artificiality of the environments in which we live. This fragility is then emphasized in Los Carpinteros’ “Show Room“, which freezes a generic Ikea everyroom in the moment of an explosion, although my attention was drawn mainly to the intricacy of the sink’s plug chain rather than reflecting on the startling overall effect and the potential reality of this scene somewhere else in the world.

The most fun - err, I mean intellectually stimulating - part of Psycho Buildings, really, was Gelitin’s “Normally, Preceeding and Unrestricted with without title“, which fills one of The Hayward’s rooftop terraces with water to create a small boating lake. This (judged in part by the length of its queue) seems to achieve most effectively what this exhibition offers, namely a novel but gentle surrealisation of an otherwise innocuous space. Rowing around in a small circle along the skyline of the Southbank may not tell you anything about where and how you live, but certainly suggests that the built environment is not as concrete and fixed as we may assume it to be. The Hayward makes a great pond.

And to pull all this towards more recent debates, these installations - especially the Gelitin boating lake - come as something of a defence of modernist architecture, even a demonstration that Brutalism isn’t such a monolithic vortex of everyday interaction and humane living space after all (see: Robin Hood Gardens’ revamp or knock-it-down-and-start-again debate). On the whole, this exhibition pulls together and makes associations between different, otherwise opposing, environments (serene boating lake and harsh concrete; everyday banality and rupturing explosion; highbrow exhibition space and lowbrow horror film set), the message of which would be that existing space can be reused and reworked in favour of moving prematurely onto something new. A change is as good as a restart.

Of late, I seem to have neglected this blog a little. Partly because I recently went here on this. Also, I’ve been working exclusively on my dissertation, and I’m wary of saturating this blog with posts about the iconography of May ‘68 (snore?), especially as we’re now in June and online attention to that period seems to be calming down. But I am determined that this blog won’t be going the way of my childhood karate lessons or brief dalliance with ornithology, and so, in a gesture of resurrection, this post will begin with a quote uncovered during my dissertation research, from Roland Barthes’ 1967 paper “Semiology and Urbanism”:

The city is a discourse, and this discourse is actually a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it.

Of course, this isn’t an unfamiliar proposal, but it places slightly different emphasis to the psychogeographical approach to urbanism with which it may seem indistinguishable. Barthes gives primacy to place: the city is there, concrete, and we traverse it as an already written text. The Situationists have it the other way around, in that we write the city ourselves, and the importance is how we internalise it. This is likewise Michel de Certeau’s angle that I’ve quoted previously.

The image above comes from Voices of Resistance from Occupied London, which is available online and as a very well produced little zine/journal. It reminds me of Guy Debord’s 1957 Psychogeographic Guide to Paris. As I was cycling through Holland, similar maps came into being in my own head, constructing mental arrangements of real places which made absolute sense to me at that moment but would invariably have been unrecognisable if charted and compared with the real topography of the places I was moving through. Specifically, I became interested in how the physical entrance that one makes into a city affects a more psychological transgression. Or, the relationship between physical experience and internal perception of new (urban) environments.

I noticed, for example, that the Dutch bike paths (which are brilliant, and this is one area where aping our Continental neighbours’ approach to urbanism would be of great benefit) often follow different routes into the cities than the major arterial roads. The bike paths regularly run alongside roads - separate, not in the glass-strewn gutter as they are here in Britain - and along pavements; but where roads all converge into hemorrhaged roundabouts, bike paths can pass under, over or around congested areas, and generally allow access into a city via routes that are more integrated with the urban environment than roads which are themselves boundaries and obstacles.

A slightly different example that I noticed when we returned to England was how London’s grandiose train stations act as portals that make a binary divide between being in the city or not. These terminals are like giant gaping mouths that swallow and spew people to and from the street. This arrival at the urban environment promts a different sensory experience to the more gradual entry by car or bike: you are suddenly there, in the midst of it all. At the train station, the city feels bigger, endless; less located and finite than having felt first hand its suburbs and physical make up. The bike can shatter the myth of the metropolis.

PS - I was thinking of making this a post about reconfigured maps, but it seems thats already quite well-trodden ground. Particularly interesting is this, Strange Maps, which demonstrates some of the effects of ideology on cartography. There’s also this oldish post from Fantastic Journal which looks at some reworked Tube maps, to which I commented a link to this map of DBB’s nascent sexuality. I like these collections of map tattoos, too, although they mostly err a bit close to Union Jack/Bulldog tattoos for me.

PPS - Later in that Barthes paper, he talks about how “the problem is to extract an expression like ‘language of the city’ from the purely metaphorical stage… the real scientific leap will be achieved when we can speak of the language of the city without metaphor”. Looking about on what I’ve just written above, its riddled with metaphor. I can’t decide whether Barthes is here offering a realisable methodology for urban thinking, or making a more vague conceptual projection as, y’know, those French philosophy guys are prone to doing.

more from greece and the conspiracy cells of fire:

On June 12 2008, we selected to strike the sponsors of the greek national squad (five targets in Athens and four in Thessaloniki).

Just as it was four years ago with the “success” of the national squad in euro, same thing now, a fair of incredible stupidity, during which thousands of clowns unite under the flag of national pride.

The tame crowds are more than willing to overlook the misery of their everyday life and turn for a few days into a mixture of phony smiles, and getting into goofy celebrations. The mass stupefaction media bombard us with thousands of advertises promoting a national sheep conscience alongside with mass consumption - the necessary parameter of every commodity fiesta. The role of multinational corporation sponsors is more than obvious, both in promoting their own merchandise as equally the national unity, creating a harmony of capitalist profiteering and implantation - revival of our hateful national identity. This is why we attacked you, we did it in the past, and we’ll be doing it in the future.

Your fiesta is full of bright lights and numerous smiles, national rag-flags, torpor spectacle and diffused nonsense. Our own celebrations are during the night, when the shiny lights give their place to the thick darkness of delinquency and become the gasoline for the fire, the movement, the destruction. Because national unity is for the frightened, we shall never compromise with any state and any nation. Our only country is the Revolution, Violent and Subversive in its steps, bound to annihilate your old world.

Generously sponsored by The Conspiracy of Cells of Fire.

It seems Greece is currently host to what I like to think of as an anarchist group in the classical style. They’re ticking all the boxes right now: symbolic bombings; revolutionary rhetoric; a combination of poetry, analysis and direct action. The critique of the molotov cocktail. Below is their latest communique, which could be straight from the RAF or Angry Brigade vaults. Hopefully the CCF (even their acronym sounds right) won’t be following the example of their predecessors too far, though, and can distinguish between an anarchist tradition and appropriate forms of direct action, militancy and communication.

“Why we set your nights on fire

Every day that passes we see and hear of the same stuff. Costliness, poverty, unemployment, corruption, bribe, scandals. A world in pain, suffering but not dying. The politicians have their palms greased, the priests as well, the policemen too, though noone seems to take his life into serious account. The citizen’s discontent runs out of steam in painless for the system protests and peaceful marches, petitions and new forms of cabled reaction that search for an identity surfing the web in innocent symbolisms.

But history is written when the silent crowd leaves and the silence’s drop-outs advance. Where we quench our rage with fire and our fire with more gasoline. We are those that cannot fit in your shiny building’s world, with its neon lights, the disgusting social conformity, fast cars, commercial centers, surveillance and control cameras, police forces of occupation in the metropolis. But, above all, we cannot fit in the blankness of this void life where even the thoughts, the emotions and the gestures follow the rules of this devious guidance and submission of our (or the market’s) desires. This also explains why you want to suit us in the prisons you build to punish all those that defy your commands. We cannot fit there either…

And if some of our comrades got captive in the enemy’s trap, keep in mind that wolves are always patient in their ambushes. We will be close to them with a clear breath waiting for our next meeting for the new attacks. In the dawn of Friday, May 30, we renewed our contracts with fire, that we will not leave more silent nights behind us and went on to 11 arson attacks in Athens and Thessaloniki (more precisely, against a Millenium bank and a Eurobank, as well as against foreign mission cars in Pilea).

We dedicate this action to the anarchists in pre-trial imprisonment Marios Tsourapas and Chrissostomos Kontorevithakis, accused for an arson attempt against a municipal police car, as well as to the also imprisoned anarchist Vaggelis Botzatzis, prosecuted for arsons against economic and governmental targets, all of them having their files considered these days whether to prolong their imprisonment.”

We send our revolutionary greetings to the 3 fugitive comrades, accused for the same case, that selected the uncompromisable path of illegality, against retreating and surrender. Our fires shall cover their traces…

IT ALL CONTINUES-WE’LL BE BACK.

Conspiracy of Cells of Fire”

Mickey Mouse is dead
Got kicked in the head
Cos people got too serious
They planned out what they said
They couldn’t take the fantasy
They tried to accept reality
Analyzed the laughs
Cos pleasure comes in halves

Subhumans - Mickey Mouse is Dead

Remember this? Well here’s a much more accurate depiction of future cities (mind you, I’ve been listening to the Subhumans a lot recently so the apocalypse is on my mind, its all those anarcho-punks talk about).

I think every blog and online news source has had something to say about this image, so I don’t want to linger on it, but - as far as I can tell - the story is this: it is reported that this picture has been used by Al Qaeda affiliated groups to promote attacks on the West and explore the possibility of a nuclear attack on Washington. It is later revealed that this is a still from a video game, has circulated before, and has simply been used in some amateur online video. The media, I hope, are shown up; “but still” - as the comments and discussions initiated by this episode go - “what if Al Qaeda were to bomb us? We should do something about this.”

The Telegraph tells us that, ” Al-Qa’eda’s propaganda arm Al Sahab releases over 80 ‘official’ videos every year, to keep the group in the public eye and generate support.” Sorry, Al-who? It seems to me that the right wing media is doing a pretty good job of keeping Al Qaeda in the public eye itself.

The lessons learnt? For one tendency: the Daily Mail and their ilk are lazy bullshit-peddlars with an absolute lack of any integrity. For another tendency: Al Qaeda and their ilk are cartoonish villians intent on utter destruction with an absolute lack of any humanity. For me: back to the Subhumans, and a suspicion that some institutions would actually be better off nuked.

]]> http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/mickey-mouse-is-dead/feed/ http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/provos-bicycle-plan/ http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/05/17/provos-bicycle-plan/#comments Sat, 17 May 2008 00:03:30 +0000 sam http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/?p=28

Amsterdamers!

The asphault terror of the motorized bourgeoisie has lasted long enough. Human sacrifices are made daily to this latest idol of the idiots: car power. Choking carbon monoxide is its incense, its image contaminates thousands of canals and streets.

PROVO’S BICYCLE PLAN will liberate us from the car monster. PROVO introduces the WHITE BICYCLE, a piece of PUBLIC PROPERTY.

The first white bicycle will be presented to this Press and public on Wednesday July 28 at 3pm near the statue of the Lieverdje, the addicted consumer, on the Spui.

The white bicycle is never locked. The white bicycle is the first free communal transport. The white bicycle is a provocation against capitalist private property, for the white bicycle is anarchistic.

The white bicycle can be used by anyone who needs it and then must be left for someone else. There will be more and more white bicycles until everyone can use white transport and the car peril is past. The white bicycle is a symbol of simplicity and cleanliness in contrast to the vanity and foulness of the authoritarian car. In other words:

A BIKE IS SOMETHING, BUT ALMOST NOTHING!

From the Dutch Provos, 1965. Stewart Home reports on the success of this move in his Assault on Culture:

The PROVOS hatched a series of ‘white plans’, as solutions to ecological and social problems facing the city, and which simultaneously acted as ‘provocations’ to the Dutch authorities. Among the more famous of these was the ‘White Bicycle Plan’. The PROVOS announced in a leaflet that white bicycles would be left unlocked throughout the city for use by the general population. The prototype of this ‘free communal transport’ was presented to the press and public on 28th July 1965 near the statue of Lieverdja. The plan proved an enormous success as a ‘provocation against capitalist private property’ and ‘the car monster’, but failed as a social experiment. The police, horrified at the implications of communal property being left on the streets, impounded any bicycle that they found left unattended and unlocked.

Its interesting how this gesture reappears forty years later - although funded by advertising and most certainly not ‘public property’ - in Paris’ Velib scheme, which also became a much-vaunted proposal from most sides during the recent London mayoral elections (I haven’t noticed any mention of it since, though). It was also tried out, I believe, in Cambridge in 1993, but abadoned after all 300 bikes were stolen on the first day. Ironically, it would seem that the measures that have made the Parisian scheme successful are the very regulations that the anarchistic Provos opposed.

I don’t understand football. I mean this in the very literal sense, of not understanding the rules (I am overstating this, of course), but also in the wider sense of not really understanding why people invest so much energy and enthusiasm in it.

Nor do I fully understand the historical influences behind football supporters, particularly the sectarian identity of Rangers supporters; and nor do I condone futile violence or hooliganism-as-ritual.

But yesterday’s events in Manchester offer an example of a (misguided) contemporary form of public anti-authoritarian mobilisation. King Mob - a British amalgam of European Situationist and American Black Mask/Up Against The Wall, Motherfucker influences - proposed the politicisation of football hooligans as a means of giving an anti-capitalist movement some muscle. For anyone who now asks whether mass social uprisings are possible in advanced capitalist countries (a la May 68): here is one answer, but its not so pretty as a poster on the Sorbonne and some hip students.

Manchester, May 2008

Paris, May 1968

]]> http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/the-battle-of-piccadilly-manchester-15th-may-2008/feed/ http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/when-the-old-is-dying-but-the-new-cannot-be-born-a-great-variety-of-morbid-symptoms-appear-gramsci/ http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/05/12/when-the-old-is-dying-but-the-new-cannot-be-born-a-great-variety-of-morbid-symptoms-appear-gramsci/#comments Mon, 12 May 2008 22:47:38 +0000 sam http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/?p=26

“If you go inside you will see a corpse, and mummies embalming this corpse. We were kindly invited to this mass but we have refused to take part. However we are here - outside, as their bad conscience.”*

The above quote was the first sentence of a flyer I was handed upon arriving at the conference “1968 and all that” last Saturday. I stuffed it into my bag along with numerous other papers and pamphlets also thrust at me, variously declaring what bastards coppers are, or how the struggle is apparantly continuing. This rhetoric and posturing proved much more interesting for me than the event itself, which was a little lacklustre. Perhaps I made poor decisions in which talks to attend. The pattern of the event, as I experienced it, was that in trying to figure out what really happened in May 68, the buck was always being passed, which seems like a common theme in looking back at this particular historical moment. For example, the organised speakers generally downplayed the significance of whatever they were supposed to be talking about: the King Mob guys reduced British Situationism to the desire to “fuck shit up”, or something; Astrid Proll seemed a little embarrassed and reluctant to speak about the RAF and her youth; and Stewart Home’s opinions on Banksy were brushed aside pretty quickly - “Banksy is not subversive” - in favour of an extended commentary on the May 68 commemorative programme.

On the other hand, regardless of the specific talk’s topic, most attendees seemed primarily interested in reminiscing about their personal involvement at the time, and their claims of how May 68 has affected their lives ever since unfortunately reminded me of that history of May that locates it as an early stage of the individualism and excess of self-interest that is imagined to have culminated in the 1980s - a version of events that Kristin Ross, for one, has contested. I was also very aware of how May seems to have become a generational event - an “I was there” moment, comparable to the Sex Pistols at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in June 1976 - in spite of another reductive understanding of May 68 as a generational conflict of children versus parents, young students (and workers) versus fatherly De Gaulle. Whether or not this is fair to say, that the average age at the event must have been over forty certainly says something about what May 68 means today.

Perhaps this process of personalisation rather than politicisation of May 68 isn’t so surprising: the conference was at times unclear whether it was celebrating - and it was celebrating, rather than critiquing - May 68 or Situationism, two separate yet often-conflated things. Whilst the Situationists were undeniably involved in May 68, their influence was far less than Guy Debord would later make out, and most of the texts and discourse that we can now go back to are actually of a more orthodox, yet very sectarian, Left-libertarian perspective. Of course, Maoist tracts are somewhat less appealing than punchy posters and witty slogans. Likewise, I suspect that those who now commemorate May 68 are those who either were of the more Situationist bent to begin with - as opposed to the, ahem, Party guys - or have since found a watered-down Situationist version of the history of the events more appealing, whereby the manifest failures of May 68 are justified by this same individualistic, almost hippy, sense of a generation who liberated their minds from alienation if not their bodies. May 68 as the Festival rather than the Revolution.

A secondary effect of this move away from an immediate political scenario - notwithstanding the presence of the SWP-types and the posturings of the Class War-types - is that commemorating May 68 becomes increasingly a “Class of 68″ reunion. Walking around as an unaffiliated visitor, you sense that everyone present has been going through this type of ritual for so long that it is now a social event, an opportunity to catch up with friends and gossip about the celebrities of the radical Left. Those once involved on a more activist level now endlessly play out petty squabbles and self-constructed dramas, imagining themselves perhaps as Guy Debord rebuffing the ICA, as mentioned in my previous post. Revisiting May 68 becomes a ritual in itself: confrontational, but enclosed; safe skirmishes that distract attention from higher forms of alienation. And, in this way, probably representative of wider ruptures in Left identities.

By Sam, Marxist-Pessimist Youth

*Interestingly, this flyer was against the mythologisation of the SI, although to make its point it utilised decidedly Situationist language: I thought this quote sounded much like Vaneigem’s, “Those who speak of revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life… have a corpse in their mouths”. As far as I can tell, principiadialectia is responsible for the flyer, whose main reason for being at the conference, it seemed, was to decry Stewart Home’s presence there, with whom it would seem that a spat has been continuing for some time now. Much to the delight of the latter, I imagine.