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A few short notes on a failing revolution.

What our governments are doing is wrong. But what our protestors, our supposed freedom fighters are doing is stupid. 

New products are sold to millions through advertising; and new ideas are sold to millions through advertising. The advanced capitalist system we live is not the same system that Marx wrote about in Capital. Socialists must begin to divert their brainpower to working out how their ideals exist within a context of this new world. The European working classes are not physically repressed; they will not rise up in glorious revolution against their oppressors. The working classes (if that term can even be used any more) are placated by this system; they are made content at the expense of ideology or belief. These people accept things that look nice and resist things that look ugly.  Our freedom fighters look ugly. They are resisted; not by police officers in body armour, but the minds of their countrymen. This fight is not against oppressors but against depressors.

You can only alter advanced capitalist systems where most people are happy through one of two ways:

a.     Civil War

b.     Advertising

Resistance, and unarmed protest cannot work in any meaningful way. The associations of such actions to the eyes of the multitude are inherently negative; irrespective of cause or intention. Systems must be gradually and intelligently manipulated or obliterated. This is the history of our nation; this is the binary state of existence in the modern age.

The danger with the first option, that of civil war, is of simple psychology; those capable of overcoming governments and nations, of destroying systems, have been proven repeatedly through out history to be both incapable of ruling in times of peace and incapable of giving up power. The force of will it takes to kill your way through your country, to separate families, kill men women and children seem to always leave scars that make it impossible to stop killing. This journey towards freedom seems only to end in tyranny.

The danger with the second option is no one has really tried to do it. That’s not to say that no one has ever thought to use advertising to sell political ideology; it is of course the benchmark tactic in any election. Normally however it used to sell benign differences to an apathetic public than skip to the back page of the newspaper or turn the channel over when newsnight comes on the tele. What if the carcophony of talented creatives and thinkers were to put their attentions to using new media to sell the idea of free education and of a return to habeus corpus to the public and politicians with a glossy smile and vast wit? What’s there to loose? Its got to be better than wasting your time “sitting in” and being either ignored or hated by the multitude of ineffectual half wits?

Some slightly incoherent thoughts on Witch House.

Notes on Witch House and a new cultural relativism.

Cosmotropia de Xam

After Hickery proclaimed the demise of postmodernism in 2007 a new relativism has taken centre stage in the West’s culture industries; its roots simultaneous stretching back through history and forward into technological possibility.  This new hauntalogical relativism; a less destructive and infinitely more exciting version of its predecessor; has utilised familiar notions of representation and reimagination to explore and develop conceptually worthy trans-disciplinary trends. Indeed cultural producers’ turn to trans-disciplinary enquiry and modes of production has in itself become both prevailing trend and defining character of this new philosophy.

Nothing better exemplifies this new paradigm than the geographical disparate musical genre that some are calling “Witch House” (also known as “Drag”, “Haunted House” and presumably a few more). This creature has spilled out of a more recent trend of Hypnagogic Pop, that is to say music that:

“[is] primarily a process, a set of tools for interrorgating memory and liberating desire, one that allowed the often hermetic world of underground music to enter into a fantasy dialogue with with consensual memory modes, exploring and often exaggerating the subconscious aspects of late 20^th century cultural dreamtime.”
- D Keenan, “Wake Up Call”, pp 43, in The Wire, issue 323, January 2011

However what marks Witch House out from other members of the hypnagogic phenomenon is its more than just a sonic construction; just like punk in the early 1970s was. Witch House is a complete package of cultural production. Its sounds are echoed by its visuals which are echoed by its writings and use of symbols. 

Mater Suspiria Vision working with Cosmotropia de Xam’s video “Holy beast of Bethlehem” exhibits these trans-disciplinary traits perfectly. Notice the use of inverted triangles throughout the piece; a symbol that repeatedly appears throughout Witch House. 

What makes Witch House particularly interesting is that successful way in which it engages with issues and trends from outside of music. In art magazine the past six months has seen a rise in articles exploring the use of spirituality in art and the role of religiosity. The problem with these explorations is they on the whole failed to acknoledge the “play” with these issues in other mediums of cultural production. Witch House as a movement both visually and sonically engage with cultures religiosity and spirituality by both engaging with the ethereal as a visual metaphor for our interaction with our cultural past and through the use of corrupted Christian semiotics. When engaging with witch house material you are both conscious and unconsciously exploring a definition of culture and question your individual as well as society as a whole’s interaction with it.  

“...I don't know if it can be called a 'scene' in the traditional sense of the word, but it seems like there's definitely a growing group of people making aesthetically similar music that people they've never met are calling 'drag'.”
Christopher Dexter Greenspan, who records as oOoOO, speaking to Pitchfork

The interesting thing to note in Greenspan’s quote is his use of the word “aesthetics”, deliberately picked over the usual choice of music related terminology. What he insinuates quite plainly is that Drag artists (as he refers to it) acknowledge that what they do is more than make music; they engage with culture and particularly our memory of it, through multiple disciplines both simultaneously and separately.

Perhaps what we are engaging with is not another musical genre but something more, one of the first cultural genre; something truly hauntalogical; an example of how practitioners (for the term artist along with musician seems obsolete in a new world of trans-disciplinary thought) are beginning to work in new ways; a methodology liberated by technological advancement and free and limitless connectivity via the internet. Perhaps this really is the cusp of the new.  

Sychotropic Sambo

Some friends have started a Tape Label. Not much there now; it is just the bud before a beautiful flower comes in to bloom.

The Remergence of Ideology in the Young: technology and resistance.

My generation, those born just before or just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and those generations after; those whose’ experience of the world is wholly formed through the internet and the absence of fear of annihilation, those whose education has been wholly Post-Modern. We were supposed to be the truly relativist generation, and we are; a true product of our upbringing. However that seems to be changing, the relativist point of view is subsiding into a marsh of idealism, a resurgence of dreams and action. Its impossible to sit at the computer and watch videos of the young literally fighting for the right to return to free-of-charge education and not see an ideology or belief in the hearts and minds of this so called generation-X.

If one is to watch this little speech, from some 15 year old toff (most have probably seen it, but bear with me) you can see a real passion burning. Watch it (again) now, but pay special attention at 4:05 minutes in:

For those that missed it he says:

“Hundreds of people joined a facebook group, school students joined a facebook group in solidarity with RMT members on strike. …”

This is an important sentence if we are to understand the reemergence of idealism within the young. What he says here is something quite profound. He accepts the equality of the virtual support of the RMT to be equal to the physical support of joining the picket lines. The speaker recognises no inferiority in communication and mobilization through online resources; particularly one website normally slandered by older generations as a waste of time and minds. This may seem like a tiny point, however I would argue it was fundamental to understanding our and future generations outlook on the world; a natural equality between virtual and physical realities. This inherent understanding of new mediums of communication harbours a newness, an ability to fight through channels and systems never before imagined or understood.

Despite this, in the face of the hike in university tuition fees, we see the young’s move out of relativism returning to an old paradigm of idealism; a socialist one.

SO?

The problem with socialist protest is it takes positive freedom to heart; its belief in “right” at the expense of others and their beliefs. It understands sacrifices must be made in order to achieve victory. And in so being it is, and has always been, a first and unknown step towards Totalitarianism. Those born in previous generations, those who badge themselves as socialists or otherwise; those who the young resistance look up to and have turned to, stemming from their own lack of experience in ideology, are the failed revolutionaries of old. Those the young are turning to for guidance are those whose’ methodologies for change essentially predate the first world war.

Our generation understands this new world in away those older generation can not comprehend, and can never fully relate to. As we have seen from our young speaker above we have the potential to open new modes of communication and resistance. Yet to date we have continued to take to the street like our fathers and mothers did to fight the poll tax. Yes they won that fight, but nothing since. We must shake off the shackles of old forms of resistance and look into ourselves to understand what can be done now. We must not let ourselves be haunted by the methodolgies of the past.

As Billy Bragg notes:

“This is the first generation to have the opportunity to create a form of socialism that is not tainted by totalitarianism. Those of us who fought the Tories in the dying days of the last century should listen and learn.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/14/student-protesters-british-left

When Marx wrote Capital everything was so expensive as to out price the majority of society. Now, now we must grapple with the rise of Free. The companies of the internet have turned to and embraced free and it doesn’t take a giant leap of faith to envisage the spread of this phenomenon. The world has changed; we are new, to respond in any way other than a new one is but futile.

Perhaps its time to understand that media representations of violence, and of images of the young dressed as the old, turns away many, and instead perhaps we should try and win friends and not enemies. To win the hearts and minds of all classes and all creeds, to not alienate any group, and let them ride with us. Free at the point of entry needn’t be a cause for only the few or for the righteous, it should be a priority for the rich and the poor, it represent our collective future. No one must be left behind. Everyone has the potential to believe, no casualties are acceptable.

We are the generation that can make this happen. 

Not our answer.

 

Old rails

 

Cultural

Rachel Whiteread

Tom, who was talking to his best friend about their first baby

Free, Free & Free; a question of paradox

As Chris Anderson notes in the opening of “Free: The future of a radical price”, the notion of Free in the English language is, in essence, confused. Derived from two Latin words “Liber” (meaning freedom and liberty, Duh) and “Gratis” (meaning without recompense or no price, duh) the bastard that is English at some point stuck them together, their meanings distinct yet permanently connected. This collision of meaning still haunts the term, compounded further by the commodification of everything in the post-industrial capitalist west, the idea of liberty seems difficult to separate from understandings of economy (I’m hesitant to ‘deploy’ the word markets as its well loaded nah).

This confusion of terms is topical; the activists protesting the end of education (whoops, fell off the fence), seem unable or perhaps unwilling to separate the meanings. The argument to make education without charge, aka Free, is being tied totally to the idea of education being an instrument of personal and socio-political liberty. The two notions of free are osciliated between often at a speed of several switches per sentence.

Is this a bad thing?

Maybe not. The advantage of using the word free in the English language is that you get to play with which conception of free you are using, and that you can use one to benefit the other endlessly; after all Free is awesomely powerful. But its also awesomely dangerous; once you being to play with liberty you enter its deadly paradox; to even try to enforce liberty/freedom is to destroy it. It is the most fragile of ideas, broken by so much as a wrong thought.

The climate camp protestors, sorry, occupationary activists have to make a decision over what freedom they are fighting for; we all do. If their fight is economic then that is one thing. If however it resides within a question of liberty and ones entitlement to it then you run the risk of making the mistake of every revolutionary group since the dawn of civilization: excluding people, impinging others and prohibiting activities. As someone probably dead once said “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and the same is historically true with insurrectionists and their claims to liberty.

To those who rightly support a gratis system of education I ask you to question the communist motives behind many activists and their supporters; do not be fooled by their claims to liberty. They are not righteous.

Afterall, there are good things that can be done with a non state-run education, there is a possibility of liberty with the opening up to the markets (whoops). Afterall many of the west’s most profitable companies charge nothing for their goods or services. Whats the point of this blog post? Same as crossing the road,

            STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, MOVE OUT…

Obligatory picture of French revolutionary violence

Ketchup pt2

Ketchup

Elastic Fantastic

Hang dat evil Gnome, Bitch!

Visions of Trees mix it up

Through da looking glass.