antyphayes:

Below is a translation of the article ‘Grèce, berceau d’un autre monde’ by Raoul Vaneigem and Yannis Youlountas. It is the first time I have published one of my translations. The French original was published on the 20th February 2012 in Libération, available here, though I initially discovered it on the Marblepunk blog, here. Shortly after finishing my translation I discovered that it had already been translated by Not Bored! His translation is available here. Nonetheless I decided to publish my translation as a self-inducement to continue translating, as well as to invite comment and criticism.

The default gender in French is male, thus only when there is a group exclusively composed of women is a female pronoun used in referring to it. In all other cases a male pronoun is used. In my translation I have dispensed with using ‘it’ and ‘its’ as the substitute for ‘he’ and ‘his’ (etc.) simply because I don’t like its thing-like quality. Instead I have opted to substitute the female pronoun in most cases. I am still unsure if this is the best way to go about translating such terms.

—

Greece, birthplace of another world

By Raoul Vaneigem, Belgian mediaevalist and ex-member of the Situationist International, and author of The Revolution of Everyday Life published in 1967. And Yannis Youlountas, philosopher and Franco-Greek writer.

For support of the fight of the Greek people and for the immediate release of the imprisoned protesters.

No, although dramatic, that which is unfolding in Greece is not a catastrophe. It is even a chance. Because the power of money for the first time has blithely exceeded the steady pace—meticulously and cleverly organised—of destruction of the public good and human dignity. And this in the land famous for its philosophy of life diametrically opposed to the Anglo-Saxon model, as too for its tireless resistance to the multiple oppressions which have attempted to rein it in. The Greek does not dance and never will dance to goose-stepping or kow-towing, regardless of the regimes that are imposed on her. Rather she dances and raises her arms as if to fly toward the stars. She writes on the walls that which she would like to read elsewhere. She burns a bank when it no longer lends her the means for making her traditional barbeque. The Greek is alive as the ideology which threatens is deadly. And the Greek, ever beaten down, always finishes by getting back up.

Yes, European finance wants to make an example. But, in its bellicose desire to strike the country which seems the most weak in the Eurozone, in its excessive violence, its mask has fallen. It is now, more than ever, the moment to point the finger to its true face: that of totalitarianism. For it is exactly this. And there is only one response to totalitarianism: the struggle, tenacious and without concession, to fight, if necessary, as existence itself is at stake. We have a world, a life, and values to defend. Everywhere in the streets, they are our brothers, our sisters, our children, our parents who are struck before our eyes even if far away. We are hungry, cold and sick with them. All the blows which are taken hurt us equally. Every Greek child who faints in the schoolyard calls us to indignation and revolt. For the Greeks, the hour has come to say no, and for us all to support them.

For Greece is today at the forefront of the fight against financial totalitarianism, which everywhere in the world destroys the public good, threatens day-to-day survival, propagating despair, fear and the cretinisation of the war of all against all.

Beyond the emotional anger which lets off steam by destroying the symbols of oppression, there develops a lucid anger, that of resistance fighters who refuse to be dispossessed of their own lives for the profit of the banking mafias and their logic of mad money. With the assemblies of direct democracy, the civil disobedience, the “Pay no more” movement and the first experience of self-management, a new Greece is being born, which rejects the tyranny of the market in the name of the human. We do not know how long it will take for the people to liberate themselves from their voluntary servitude, but it is sure that faced with the ridicule of political nepotism, corrupt democracies and the grotesque cynicism of the State banksters, we will have only one choice—against all racketeering—of making our lives ourselves.

Greece is our past. It is also our future. Reinvent it with her!

In 2012, let’s all be Greeks!

 

Recently my review of McKenzie Wark’s The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International was published on the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books website. Wark’s book is yet another contribution to the falsification of the Situationist International’s ‘everyday life and glorious times.’ 

Wark’s book is full of factual errors, a few of which I have drawn attention to in the review. However the most appalling aspect of the book is in terms of its interpretative logic. Wark disguises his opinion by making historical figures act as his mouthpiece, whether that is Asger Jorn, Alexander Trocchi or even Guy Debord at times. Wark offers nothing new in terms of commentary and also pointedly fails to make good his promise of demonstrating the ‘contemporary resonance’ of aspects of the SI’s activity. The book is a poor introduction to the SI and anyone seeking such from it should instead seek out the writings of the SI themselves—most of them are available in English translation at the following sites: Bureau of Public Secrets, Not Bored! and Situationist International Online. The problem that people who are not familiar with the situationists face in reading Wark is that Wark’s substantive position is to be discovered in what he does not say and leaves out in order to fashion an account favourable to his barely concealed bias, in this case the boring old chestnut of favouring the so-called ‘artistic’ SI.

Below is a version of the review published at the Marx and Philosophy Review of Books website. It is longer than the one published as I had a chance to reincorporate some of the paragraphs that were cut because of editorial restrictions regarding the length of the piece.

—

McKenzie Wark
The Beach beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International
Verso, London and New York, 2011.

Early in his book on the Situationist International (SI), McKenzie Wark writes: ‘Do we really need another commentary on Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle?’ (4). It is an odd question, considering the dearth of good critical commentaries on Debord’s work in the English language. Certainly there is a growing quantity of books on the SI, as many have noted. Unfortunately, few provide new or insightful things to say on Debord’s La société du spectacle published in 1967. One exception is Anselm Jappe’s Guy Debord, translated into English and published in 1999. Wark notes that Debord’s 1988 Commentaires sur la société du spectacle is ‘enough,’ but this is mere rhetoric, and facile at that (ibid.) If we can consider any author’s commentary on their own work ‘enough’, then why bother writing a book such as Wark’s, which presents itself as commentary upon the SI? A better question to ask is: ‘Do we really need yet another fragmentary and inadequate introduction to the SI?’

Cunningly subtitled ‘The everyday life and glorious times of the SI,’ Wark’s The Beach Beneath the Street mostly covers aspects of the group before the so-called split with the artists in 1962. It is the oft- described ‘artistic’ SI of 1957-62 that is Wark’s main focus. He is also concerned with the Lettrist International pre-history of the SI in the 1950s, as well as some of the influences and results of the 1957-62 period, such as Henri Lefebvre and the work of Constant and Alexander Trocchi after they left the group in 1960 and 1964 respectively. About the greater portion of the SI’s ‘glorious times’ Wark barely writes. Crammed into the brief, final chapter is miserly coverage of the 1962-72 period of the group, his account remarkable only for its brevity, omissions and haste. Here you will find name-checked the group’s article on the Watts riots of 1965, and their book on the wildcat strike of May 1968. However, Wark is not capable even of dedicating the entirety of the eleven pages of this chapter to what is without doubt the most significant period of the SI’s ‘glorious times’, whether considered from its general effects upon working class contestation in the late 1960s and 1970s, or its enduring legacy for pro-revolutionaries today.

Wark is at his best when he writes ‘The Beach Beneath the Street claims no originality whatsoever’ (3). Certainly his book adds nothing new, whether in empirical revelation or critical commentary. When it comes to more positive claims for his work, Wark puts forward vague statements as a smokescreen: ‘it’s a question of retrieving a past specific to the demands of the present’ (ibid.), and ‘the criterion for inclusion is not historical importance but contemporary resonance’ (4). The problem is that Wark, in presenting a false dilemma between ‘historical importance’ and ‘contemporary resonance’, never clarifies why the ‘demands of the present’ require him to present this account rather than another.

In his defence, Wark presents his book as an attempt to avoid ‘artifacts […] too well remembered’, such as Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life, significant works of the post-1962 SI (ibid.) We should be suspicious of any account of the SI that proclaims its intent to ‘bypass’ the two best-known works of the group. Despite Wark’s apparently noble desire to ‘draw attention to some less well-known moments’ in order better to highlight the emergence of the ‘collective existence of the Situationist International’ from ‘the practice of everyday life’ (ibid.), it never occurs to him that Debord’s and Vaneigem’s books were the clear results of the collaborative everyday practice of the SI, distillations of the situationists’ attempt to realise philosophy, even if ‘written’ by the aforementioned individuals. To understand these works in term of the collective activity of the SI, particularly of the SI between 1962 and late 1967 (when both of these works were published), would go some way to correcting the spectacle of Debord and Vaneigem as the individual geniuses of the SI, a conception propagated by the enemies of the SI rather than the SI themselves. Wark appears to be aware of such spectacular appropriations of the situationists. Sadly, the effect of his ‘bypass’ is to reinforce just such a false picture of the SI. A better option would have been to confront it head-on.

If we consider Wark’s account of the 1962 split, we begin to understand his work as the confluence of its many faults: its omissions, its patchy research, its barely repressed bias in favour of the so-called ‘aesthetic’ phase of the SI pre-1962; all come together in his less than illuminating account of the SI in the crucial years of 1960 to 1962. Unfortunately, in the chapter dedicated to the 1962 split and its aftermath, Wark omits crucial events, and confuses the timing of others in order to produce a picture conducive to his perspective: ‘Art was now officially anti-Situationist. Spur were expelled. There was no procedure, no consensus. They were out’ (113).

Puzzling is Wark’s version of the simmering tensions between the Spur artists and the rest of the SI from the outset of the Spur group joining in 1959. His account suggests that such tensions arose from the Spur artists tilting the SI ‘toward their particular concerns’ (111). Wark needs to make such an assertion in order to set up Debord as the master manipulator, gathering ‘the forces that would enable him to dispense with their [the Spur artists’] nettlesome presence’ (ibid.) Discussion of two significant milestones in the development of these tensions, the 4th Conference of the SI held in London in September 1960, and the 5th Conference of the SI held in Göteborg in August 1961, are dealt with in the most cursory fashion. Wark mentions the 4th conference at the beginning of the chapter on the split, but only in the most superficial way, i.e. he does not mention any of the debates at the conference, in particular the debate over the role of artists and the proletariat initiated by the Spur artists, favouring instead a redundant literary description of the building in which the conference was held. Of the 5th conference there is not a word, even though it was at this conference that the argument between the Spur artists on the one hand, and Debord, Kotányi and Vaneigem on the other, reached its peak.

Considering Wark’s charge that ‘art was now officially anti-Situationist’ as a result of the 1962 split, it is interesting to note that it was at the 5th conference in 1961 that the work of art is first described as ‘anti-situationist’ by Attila Kotányi and Vaneigem. Significantly, Kotányi argued that this did not mean that situationists were forbidden to create art objects; such an injunction would, in any case, be ludicrous in a group that neither held nor aspired to the spectacular power it contested, not to mention the ongoing creation of art objects by situationists in the SI after they split with the artists. Rather, Kotányi, Vaneigem and Debord were arguing against the tendency of the Spur group of artists who juggled their ‘real world’ obligations to art dealers and the art market with their membership in the SI, even using the caché of their membership of the SI as a selling point for their art. As Vaneigem noted at the same conference, ‘the point is not to elaborate a spectacle of refusal, but to refuse the spectacle. In order for their elaboration to be artistic in the new and authentic sense defined by the SI, the elements of the destruction of the spectacle must precisely cease to be works of art’ (Situationist International, 2006).

There are other faults with Wark’s account of the 1962 split. For instance he confusedly presents the Hamburg Theses as a secret even from other members of the SI. And by ignoring the 5th conference he is unable to contextualise the Hamburg Theses, considering the theses were composed immediately after and as a consequence of the arguments over art at the 5th conference.  Worse still, by not accounting for the timing of the events he presents the Hamburg Theses in a way that could lead to the mistaken belief that they were composed after the split with the Spur artists, even though they were composed 5 months before the meeting of the SI’s Central Council on the 10th and 11th of February 1962. And though it was at this meeting the Spur artists were expelled Wark never mentions the meeting, even to attempt a refutation of its justification for the expulsion. All we get is ‘there was no procedure,’ even though there was, and ‘no consensus,’ even though the SI never operated on the consensus model.

Another example of avoiding the truth of the historical record is set up in an introductory comment: ‘The chapter on Henri Lefebvre shows what the Situationists took from him, as well as what he took from them.’ (5). Flash forward to the chapter in question and we find largely an exegesis of Lefebvre’s work that coincides with his brief relationship with Debord and the SI. Notably absent from Wark’s one-sided discussion of this relationship is the way it ended. Here you will find no mention of the SI’s 1963 pamphlet ‘Into the dustbin of history!’ in which the situationists accused Lefebvre of a self-seeking plagiarism and demonstrated their claim by reproducing the relevant sections from his offending article ‘The significance of the commune’ alongside of their article ‘On the commune’ written by Debord, Kotányi and Vaneigem. Most striking about Wark’s omission, regardless of whether you agree or not with the argument of the SI against Lefebvre, is that he divides what was proximally related into two distinct events. Thus the end of the friendship is merely ‘a casualty of the tensions of the times’ (108), whereas in another chapter Wark footnotes: ‘Only after his [Lefebvre’s] encounter with the Situationists would the city emerge as the great theme of his writing. No wonder they accused him of plagiarism’ (166). The point is that the SI ended the relationship precisely because of the accusation of plagiarism, not because of the more vague ‘tensions.’ Thus Wark’s account of Lefebvre and the SI is commensurate with his non-account of the expulsions of 1962. Rather than a serious examination of the arguments raised at the time Wark opts for casual dismissal and a loose deployment of ‘facts.’

There is nothing redeeming about Wark’s account of the situationists. That is not to say that there is no potential in his subject matter. A striking example of this is his chapter-long consideration of Asger Jorn’s Critique of Political Economy. Little has been written on Jorn’s 1960 book criticising Marx’s conception of value. Wark, however, never manages to improve on a similar exegesis in the final chapter of Richard Gombin’s The Radical Tradition. Considering Jorn’s critique of Marx’s formalism, a misguided critique at that, you would think that Wark would attempt to relate it to more recent scholarship on Marx’s theory of the value-form. However, Wark is completely out of his depth, opting like Gombin for a largely descriptive exposition rather than a critical interrogation. Jorn’s criticism of Marx can be excused insofar as he apparently had access neither to the Grundrisse nor, understandably, to the rich tradition of value-form criticism that began to develop in the 1960s and 1970s. Wark has no excuse in this regard. The best he is able to do is to have Jorn speak like Jean Baudrillard avant la lettre. Thus Marx is taken to task for the well-worn charge of reducing all value to a labour essentialism. However, such a charge can no longer stand against Marx’s conception of value as a form that is imposed through capitalist social relations, a conception that has been more clearly revealed through value-form criticism. What Jorn had in his sights was the ‘orthodox’ Marxist concept of a value substance or content that is revealed through the development of productive forces. Certainly, Jorn was right to take this conception to task; where he was wrong was in attributing it to Marx rather than to the Marxisms of the Second and Third Internationals. By merely resurrecting Jorn’s anachronistic critique, Wark inadvertently reveals how much he has in common with Castoriadis, Baudrillard, Lyotard and other ‘critics’ of Marx who rarely moved beyond confusing Marxism with Marx. Of more interest would have been an account of the relationship between Jorn’s critique of Marx, and Debord’s critique of Marxism set out in the fourth chapter of The Society of the Spectacle. Here Debord examined the tension between Marx’s innovatory dialectical critique and its reduction to an ideology of technical innovation and ultimately capitalist renewal. Sadly, the possibility of such a fruitful discussion is foreclosed by Wark’s ‘bypass.’

One area in which Wark attempts to be novel, or so it appears, is in his distinction between high and low theory. But here you will find nothing much of use. Wark distinguishes between the high theory of the academic institutions and the low theory ‘indifferent to the institutional forms of the academy or the art world’ (3). Why this distinction is necessary is, again, unclear as it serves no critical role in his work. Rather it appears to be some sort of badge of honour, an attempt to take on the mantle of academic theorist with street-cred. But the situationists were not interested in a low theory or any specialised theory separate from the concerns and practice of everyday life. Rather they were interested in putting theory back into play in everyday life and thus overcoming its academic separation practically. Thus any theory, low, high or otherwise, could be diverted to critical and practical ends. As a bizarre coda to his attempt to set low theory against the high theory ‘of the academy or the art world’ Wark invokes Debord in order to justify Wark’s own position amongst the purveyors of so-called ‘high’ theory! He writes: ‘Just as Debord, with the founding of the Situationist International, accepted the tactic of positioning the movement within rather than against the art world, perhaps today one might take up a defensive position within higher education rather than against it’ (158). Perhaps one might. The problem is Debord never accepted such a tactic. As Wark should know the situationists initially positioned themselves within and against the art world. Considering this, Wark’s falsification of the early situationist attitude to art can surely only be self-serving. And to make matters worse he never explains what he means by such a ‘defensive position.’ Without doubt it would be a worthwhile argument to make considering the situationists movement from a critical position within the avant-garde of the art world to one of unremitting hostility to it. Sadly Wark never makes the argument instead remaining at the level of an appeal to a falsified authority.

McKenzie Wark is a false friend of the SI, whether in terms of their historical importance or their contemporary resonance. The writings of the situationists are still the surest guide to their theory and practice, and perhaps even more accessible than Wark’s attempt, considering their ready availability online. You can find most of them online in English translation at Bureau of Public Secrets, Not Bored! and Situationist International Online.

References
•    Gombin, Richard 1976. The Radical Tradition: A Study in Modern Revolutionary Thought, trans. Rupert Swyer (London: Methuen).
•    Jappe, Anselm 1999. Guy Debord, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press).
•    Situationist International 2006. Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. and trans. by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets).

Anthony Hayes is currently writing a PhD on the Situationist International, with a particular focus on their time during and after the breaks with the politicians and the artists in 1961 and 1962. 

Leaflet for (re)Occupy Melbourne

by immediateworldwidedereification on October 27, 2011
Leaflet handed out at Occupy Melbourne 2.0 on 29th October

It doesn’t make any sense!

“You’ve made your point, now move along” is their refrain, showing that they’ve completely missed the point themselves.

If we don’t have any leaders, it’s because we don’t want to be followers; we don’t want our movement’s energy to be channelled back into the same old fake ‘solutions’.

Capital’s reach seems total…

The violent expansion of capitalism over the last few centuries has seen its reach extend to every corner of the globe, and its logic shape every aspect of our lives. What we do to survive, what we do for fun, our sexuality, our gender, every role that we play has been intimately shaped by capital’s domination. Capital turns us into objects and uses us when it’s profitable, and spits us out when it’s not. Thousands each day die of hunger and disease because it’s not profitable to feed them or heal them. Hundreds of millions live in shanty towns and slums because there’s no money to be made building decent houses. The environmental crisis spirals further out of control, because it’s not profitable to stop it. Productivity is ever-increasing, abundance is everywhere, and yet it’s impossible to live a decent life unless you can find a way to get money. Over two billion humans can’t get jobs even if they wanted them because capitalism has no need for them. And billions more waste their lives doing pointless soul-crushing, health-destroying work that exists only to make someone, somewhere a profit. Even where our jobs could be useful, the logic of money has shaped them so utterly that they might as well not be.

If there’s one thing that stands out about this occupation, and the occupations worldwide, it’s the amazing mutual aid and community that has developed around them. All sorts of people from all sorts of different backgrounds are coming together and becoming open to new perspectives, questioning old assumptions, putting time and energy into things they find useful, actively communicating with each other and relating to each other as humans, without the filter of money.

What we’re glimpsing is the possibility of a post-capitalist world, where human relations aren’t commercial transactions, where goods don’t represent money but a concrete means to satisfy real human needs. A world in which competing corporations and warring nations are replaced by a real, human community that uses the resources of all for the benefit of all. Such a world could be called communism but has nothing in common with the state-capitalist regimes that exist or existed in Russia, China and Cuba. Nothing is changed fundamentally if capitalists are replaced with bureaucrats with “better intentions”. Those regimes were not only thoroughly undemocratic, they also perpetuate wage-labor, exploitation and oppression of the vast majority of the population. The change must go deeper and must free the oppressed, make them part of a real democracy instead of the lie we have today.

Capitalism is in crisis, and its states have no choice but to go on the attack. Capital’s profit has been slipping for years, and its representatives are rushing to save it, no matter what the cost to us. Governments across the world of all stripes – Socialist governments in Spain and Greece, Conservatives in the UK, Democrats in the USA, despots in Syria, Tunisia and Egypt, Labour in Australia… all are bound to the logic of capital. All must keep the economy afloat, and that means by attacking us – whether it’s directly through austerity measures that make us suffer for capital’s profit, or more subtly by massive public spending that increases inflation and makes us effectively poorer anyway. Whatever political party gets in, they’ll still have the economy – capitalism – to manage, and will do so at our expense, no matter how green, sustainable and democratic their rhetoric may be when they’re not in power…

Capitalism is in crisis, and there is only one way out

“This is not a police state, we are here to demonstrate” goes the slogan, overlooking that police are integral to the state, which is in turn integral to capitalism, and that movements that merely demonstrate don’t challenge any of these.

Of course, the movement now is only small, but we can see it growing by the day. The more we talk and discuss and act, the more we occupy, the closer we come to a better world, a human world. Let nothing be taboo. Talk to everyone about the movement, identify its limits, and move beyond them.

Occupy everything. Take everything. Change everything.

This is just the beginning…

by spasssmaschine@googlemail.com

In the northern suburbs of Canberra in an alleyway one can find the above graffiti. It is a translation of the final line of J. Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Matinée d’Ivresse—Drunken Morning. In the original the line reads ‘Voici le temps des Assassins.’

I discovered this graffiti some years ago, I can’t remember exactly when—five years at most. At the time I was quite excited, imagining the perpetrators and their rage against suburban Canberra. I dreamt of meeting these mysterious figures and embarking on a city wide spree of poetry; an outpouring of words to make the shame of Canberra more shameful by making it public; the city whose proletarian reality is barely masked by its bourgeois pretension and appearance.

It began in utter boorishness, and now it ends
In angels of fire and ice.

We would steal through the nights, modern hashshashin drunk on poetry and truth. Alas I have never found the perpetrators, or perpetrator.

Arguably the poem is about or at least influenced by the smoking of hash, the time of the hashshashin.

This poison will stay in our veins even when, as the fanfares depart,
We return to our former disharmony.

In the time of its writing, the early 1870s, literary Paris had been sometime fascinated by the Orient. The story of the hashshashin had been popularised by the French orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy, who had written of the them in 1809 as a drug crazed sect of murderers during the Middle Ages.

We have faith in poison.
We will give our lives completely, every day.

Though still a popular conception, this appears to be fallacious.

Over the years I have scrawled my words and other peoples’ words across the walls of this city. A photograph of one of my efforts, ‘These Bad Days Will End,’ can be found in Julian Fleetwood’s A Zine about Canberra, though this graffito itself is no more, lost to the march of redevelopment and sanitary urbanism.

The situationists recommended détournement as a method of using the cultural detritus of mass production for not merely creative ends (like making more crap things for sale), but more importantly for refashioning our lives, for creating our lives for no other reason that we are briefly alive and becoming before we are nothing again. However the greatest impediment to the rational use of the products of capitalist society is the irrational capitalist organisation of everyday life. Instead of a dance to the music of time life has become a contest of endurance as we are goaded on to grasp and accumulate even as we lose everything, as we must.

I unreservedly recommend to the inhabitants of particular zones, transient or otherwise, remaking and refashioning the decor of their days and lives, in the style of the imaginary hashshashin of north Canberra,

FOR THIS IS THE ASSASSINS’ HOUR.

[Excerpts taken from Paul Schmidt’s translation of Matinée d’Ivresse]

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even myself
The zombies came from else-when from right out-of-space
We had long imagined the infestation of our bad conscience our worst fears
Instead this virus was a confabulation; like our culture
Its protein jacket a series of non-existent walls inside your head
How paradoxical
Is a head; without a body?

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even my dollars
They turned to dust on exposure to the light
The zombie ships cooked the planet below their parabolic mirrors shone high
From the sky the waves came and death rolled over us
Nothing was too good or unworthy of a bite; the bait is in our veins
They call it life
I call it blood and strife

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even my mother
She joined their ranks at the drop of a tea set
They crashed in plates cracked the exquisite gold leaf under microwave assault
White hot sparks; incandescent
I remember a cup spinning in the steel cavity of an oven
I remember the infested house
Burning flesh and an excess of bodily fluids sprayed about

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even my lust
For everything and everybody turned inside out
Except those that ran and fought and fled wherever
Along the empty roads and abandoned wrecks
My personality is absorbed as the world dissolves and history is re-set
We begin again
Without a head; without a soul

In the zombie invasion I lust everything even my wife
She feeds on a young man devours him all eventually
How long does it take to consume a corpse or produce a life?
She crouches and licks her chops
Better to be a meal than a converted body evacuated of days and melancholy
How to stop her?
Stop thinking her; she is over; bash! bash! bash!

In the zombie invasion I found my father asleep
I found him under the stone planted on mother
On her dead eyes her smashed in jaw I buried her in a hurry
Sometimes I sleep I hide away from the air
To dream there is no-one no shadows
I am alone in a series of postures that move quickly; that stop
Like my father
My mother is the world; grows cold

In the zombie invasion all I did was write this stupid poem
It came shambling to the front as they say shambling to the front of my thought
But that is a lie I wrote nothing and my thoughts do not shamble
Like zombies they run they never stop
They just get vague and dreamy from time to time
Fixated on the slaughter
Devouring brains and words and order; all order

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even the will to write
My zombie poem has a conventional structure
It is made up of letters phonemes thoughts made from flesh
But a grunt will do or a cry
A terrible deafening wail as they find you and descend
Hunt them down!
Destroy them all! No quarter!

In the zombie invasion I lost everything even the smell of rot
The days still pass one day just like any other
Now they hold a struggle with a foe that does not recognise
Only the desire for brains; not what they make
How does one stop this all consuming?
The blank sun shines; on the dead and the living
Become living death
It ends with a rattle; with a wheeze

      August/September 2010

Following this paragraph is the text from a leaflet I handed out at the Traverse Poetry Project’s showcase at the You Are Here festival at the “smithdick” corner replete with Ray White real estate offer for a reasonable deal and “quiet riot” gripes on Saturday 14 March 2011. To David Finnigan’s question on the night regarding the leaflet being merely negative I answered “no.” Guilty as charged. I am not against the attempts to use urban space in a more creative fashion; I believe there should be more of this. However I do believe we should combine our artistic reappropriation of life from the boredom of wage slavery with a critique of wage slavery; that is we should make what is implicit in our creative practice - a critique of alienating work practices - an explicit part of our creative practice. Further we should combine this with an argument of why wage slavery is the greatest enemy of a creative and rational control everyday life. Capitalism will not give us space elevators or real creative freedom; and by real I mean a materially wealthy and ideas rich world in which the market is not the primary principle of social organisation.

TRAVERSE POETRY PROJECT… YOUAREHERE… YOUR TIME IS UP… RETURN TO THE VATS…

As I mosey on into town what do I see before me pilgrim? Julian Fleetwood’s Traverse Poetry Project showcase brought to you by David Finnigan et al’s You Are Here festival. The Traverse Poetry Project full of such promise has struggled with its worse face from the outset: the pores of the market. Competition is an interesting principle to organise creative production around and great results are often in the offing—but there are worlds of difference between the Dionysia of Ancient Athens and the culture factories of today. When a society submits everything to the rule of the commodity and competition under the false claims of the ‘rationality’ of the market something is wrong (cf. still unfolding oil wars and economic and political and environmental crisis from 2007/08 to now regarding the rationality of the market). It is the totalitarian domination of the principle of ‘what’s in it for me?’ in its various guises with occasional playful respite—like Traverse Poetry.

Despite the obvious talent on show tonight ladies and gentlemen there is no progress in comparing the work of the poet to that of a whore.  By turning the world into a brothel do we celebrate the oldest profession? Or is this the miserable song of our own slavery? Pimp and whore; master and servant; we drink to dull the noise of this party in the shadows with small change to spare. We hail the new aesthetic: Again! Creativity! Whatever! Hoorah! We hail the meat for sale. Poetry must be made by all not by one. The market in poetry is overrated. Why buy when you can sell? And if we are all sellers why not make a gift of your words your sweet memories reshuffled and forgotten? Down with the market in poetry and off with your heads they are not that different; go on grab the ears and see. Idiots! Pedlars in the misery of curtains! What’s behind the curtain?

The traverse poetry project could have been a conversation, an argument about creation, about how to live; about poetry. Instead entertainment won. Traverse skirts the one dimensional no one is a winner culture of the market in culture when it sets out to showcase poets like this year’s best new product. Come on, invest everybody! Show poets talk good; speak funny! Poetry can be fun too! Damn right it is fun but not when you have to whore it. In capitalist society we are increasingly driven to be both whore and pimp of our eminently marketable existence.  We become our own slave drivers, our own sub contractors: we write for ourselves and for the man. And sometimes we even reach the utopia of poetry in our laments for this world; pale reflections of the ‘ought’ in the midst of the ‘is’.

In the realm of the ‘ought’ Finnigan’s You Are Here festival admirably points to the empty shop spaces and asks ‘why can’t we create here?’  However such questions cannot be adequately answered by well meaning (or otherwise) art bureaucrats doling out cash. Too much depends upon the whim and largesse of the capricious patrons of the state and controllers of wealth. If by simply holding the festival Finnigan is suggesting we should take over these spaces take over this world our world at anytime or all the time not just festival time that we should squat these spaces occupy them and turn them into living artworks or just living works—then right on and roll on. I suspect that this is not the case.

So farewell Traverse, you are here…

BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

 

The History of Science Fiction,

           so far, or is it all over? Stay tuned.

And where to fit in ‘foreign’ SF? Maybe as an unspeakable tumour or cyst, like Stanislaw Lem mysteriously floating around the New Wave banner. Who else? Name your favourite ones forgotten. Julian Gracq. The Strugatsky’s.  Isidore Ducasse. G.W.F. Hegel.

Millennia constitute its hideous tale; nothing much counts as SF before 1800 even if the bulk of all hitherto poetry appears to be the condition of modern SF and then BANG! it’s 1800 and SF is taking off with Stephenson’s Rocket! Speculative Science Fiction Fiction the vastest beastie of them all; after all everything points to its historical necessity!

Other mysterious and unfortunate omissions: M. John Harrison and what should be J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Crystal World’ is just ‘The Crystal.’ We want the world and we want it…

Aktion Surreal is the name of an art-terrorist group I was a founder of and a member of between 1991 and 1994. Art, because we made stuff; terror, because we were adept at pissing people off, destroying stuff and not following rules – some of us at least. We also believed and many of us still believe that we can make a better more rational and creative world. That marked us out from the other art junkies of Canberra and the world.

Gerald Keaney has now written an account of this group and its aftermath sprayed over the rest of the 1990s and beyond. I am working on account probably as you read this. Either that or I will be asleep, or something else.

 

What Lies Beneath?

One

The future will be empty; evacuated; devoid of the living. The human race has lost and we go on pretending; the human race is lost. Can we find some specimens amidst the wreckage? In the year twenty-eleven there are some living in the ruins of a state bureaucracy; the empty arteries of an artificial brain; a vanished nation.

This city has passed; it was precisely what they imagined; the movement of millions had demolished it; demolition and negative thought. Behind the avenues and overgrown parks behind the living a cool phantasm had spread; a desert of desire. No one crosses these sands they merely calculate the shifting boundary after the shift; or give up and drive for the centre; they drive and then disappear. No one returns.

In the recording stations along the edges we pretend that the sand is an invitation; we pretend it is a vast beach turned in upon itself. The ocean recedes shimmering above the mounds and ridges. At the centre the exact origin of the growth there is a ship a broken wreck named That Which Lies Beneath. Within mysteries beyond compare. The barnacles that grow on its hull in regular patterns one, two, many sided, come no closer to the cargo than you or I. The source of the desert is a wreck and always remains.

Of the source I dream.
In the city I dream.
Over counters I dream.
Coffee tables I dream.
The zones that I pass through as rapidly as the goods and services I buy and sell.

We are our own carpetbaggers; our own undertakers; not even footballs;
And we have answered long ago the question of how to industrialise private life:
1. Drive the desert into the future forever after;
2. Hide it within a desert more grandiose of panoply multiform;
3. Find disciples to write odes to this barren; the billions must be dissolved in its utter exhausted issue:

Poems more poems for the desert!

Poems more poems is alpha and omega Moses and the prophets. Produce more poems many poems far flung asymptote of mastery without masters without poems necessarily without poems an immense accumulation of poems its unit being a single poem; this poem.

This poem will wear out; they all do in the end.

Two

Across the desert the grains pile up; around That Which Lies Beneath and its unspeakable cargo.

On the edge where the desert sands cease the recording stations trace every sensation. They will continue until the extinction or replacement of the sun. Upon the spinning drums of fate a needle scratches the point of inception.

Each recording station stands in for each person stands in for each person that ever lived or ever will; the matter of the memory of matter undergoing collapse; every being generating data or is generated in turn; needles scratch at the point of inception.

Across the desert the grains pile up; around That Which Lies Beneath and its unspeakable cargo.

The ship ebbs; the sand drifts; the hum of this passage.

 

NB. This poem-object is also the script for a projected film. More on this later.

The bulk of this poem was written before the beginning of the mass protests in Cairo and Egypt on the 25th of January or after the resignation of Mubarak on the 11th of February. A mere bit was written during these events mostly due to being either glued to the net reading about it and watching and listening as it unfolded, or worrying about my post graduate study or lack thereof or other attempts to dispel the counter-revolutionary boredom of life entwined in capitalist social relations.

The Frightening