Thursday, December 29, 2005
Friendly Schizophrenia or Revolution for the 21st Century.
The justification for art and revolution stem from the same source - resistance to the straightjacket of the Regular World. Crazy is defined as a challenge to the normal way of things whether it is the complex norms of a civilization or just the downhome tribal way.
Art in the view of an Albert Camus was rebellious dissatisfaction with the world as it is - whether the work of God or The State. Anywhere my soul, said Baudelaire, so long as it's out of this world. While the Argentinian revolutionaries call for Anybody so long as its no one we know.
Both Art and Revolution have been tainted with The Future, the false value worshipped in our Modern Age but both are actually about the Suppressed Present. We engage in freedom when we open the Pandora's box of sternly forbidden realities and actually begin to entertain these realities.
We live in a blooming buzzing present that we have been taught to repress and deny with all the force that the Regular World can bring to bear on us. As revolutionaries, we revolt against the false fate offered by the Regular World and seek the power to generate a revolutionary doubt about the world as an unalterable given. The State is that megalith that circumscribes human nature for all time and compels us to submit our own rebellious nature.
As artists who have given full rein to our crativity, we produce works that question the existing world as the only world there is. We ask instead how has this world come to be what it is. We dare to measure the given of this Regular World by our own standard of perfection. Not a standard of ideal perfection formulated for us in advance but by a standard of perfection that has been latent within us and rendered unconscious by the Regular World.
Out of the nowhere of our suppressed Present, a mob of barbarians can emerge as a community of resistance. This is the child waking in us in the morning with No School and an open agenda. Suddenly you and yours define the day and all the Regular World can do is make threats and call in the police. The present is no longer an unalterable eternity.
This is not the moment for the imposition of a politically corect line. Despair or hope, both are reasonable starting points. There is no future in conserving the old values of some humanist or fundamentalist ayatollahs that survive by the monstrous exploitation of our nature. Utopia or dystopia, we want anything rather than validating our suppresed present
Then we can dissolve the illusions of permanance in the bulwarks of order and participate in a world of process and becoming. From being someone's creatures, we become creative. From being what's made, we become the makers of whatever. Artists and Revolutionaries. The opening is here to become both if we so choose.
Art in the view of an Albert Camus was rebellious dissatisfaction with the world as it is - whether the work of God or The State. Anywhere my soul, said Baudelaire, so long as it's out of this world. While the Argentinian revolutionaries call for Anybody so long as its no one we know.
Both Art and Revolution have been tainted with The Future, the false value worshipped in our Modern Age but both are actually about the Suppressed Present. We engage in freedom when we open the Pandora's box of sternly forbidden realities and actually begin to entertain these realities.
We live in a blooming buzzing present that we have been taught to repress and deny with all the force that the Regular World can bring to bear on us. As revolutionaries, we revolt against the false fate offered by the Regular World and seek the power to generate a revolutionary doubt about the world as an unalterable given. The State is that megalith that circumscribes human nature for all time and compels us to submit our own rebellious nature.
As artists who have given full rein to our crativity, we produce works that question the existing world as the only world there is. We ask instead how has this world come to be what it is. We dare to measure the given of this Regular World by our own standard of perfection. Not a standard of ideal perfection formulated for us in advance but by a standard of perfection that has been latent within us and rendered unconscious by the Regular World.
Out of the nowhere of our suppressed Present, a mob of barbarians can emerge as a community of resistance. This is the child waking in us in the morning with No School and an open agenda. Suddenly you and yours define the day and all the Regular World can do is make threats and call in the police. The present is no longer an unalterable eternity.
This is not the moment for the imposition of a politically corect line. Despair or hope, both are reasonable starting points. There is no future in conserving the old values of some humanist or fundamentalist ayatollahs that survive by the monstrous exploitation of our nature. Utopia or dystopia, we want anything rather than validating our suppresed present
Then we can dissolve the illusions of permanance in the bulwarks of order and participate in a world of process and becoming. From being someone's creatures, we become creative. From being what's made, we become the makers of whatever. Artists and Revolutionaries. The opening is here to become both if we so choose.
Friday, December 23, 2005
Faith in Revolution
What we lack now is not so much a plan for rapid social change (the famous REVOLUTION) but just the simple faith that anything much new can be accomplished. Years ago the Arthur Schlesinger Juniors began panting after the William Buckleys.
It was the liberals who had overseen the birth of the National Security State. Truman accepted the paternity. He got the best bang by not passing the buck. But for his successor Adlai Stevenson it was not a baby but a hot potato. He prayed in public that the the buck in fact be passed from him.
Stevenson became the architype for the liberal's dignified method of defeat. His name is first in an inglorious list of losers whose names glow phosphoresently - Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Eagleton, Edwards, Carter, Humphrey, to name a few.
In their search for a stable ruling center to fob their power off upon, the liberals went neo. In their Urge to Power, the conservatives went tina (there is no alternative).
Rapid social change (good old Revolution Now) became the truly unthinkable. This was the best of all Darwinian worlds. The Haves and the Havemores were happily red in tooth and claw and black in the bottom line. For the havenots and havenevers, evolution was a slow, slower, slowest Chinese water torture, a working class tortoise that never caught up with the capitalist hare.
The Movement of the sixties and seventies formulated the terms of the overthrow of the 4 Horsemen of Bourgeois Democracy: classism, sexism, racisn and ageism. Eisenhower, the polidiot savant, called the cancerous growth the Military/Industrial/Political Complex. The 1st Kennedy, who was at once the last liberal and the first neoliberal, died of the contradiction. The 2nd Kennedy was killed for representing a fusion of the Movement and political party. This became the McGovern reform party - loaded down with quotas, aspirations and entitlements. This was killed by party bosses. Rule fell safely into the hands of the WORMS for whom a Strict Constitution and a Stricter God had made the world. (WORMS: White Old Rich Men)
Once the wave of rapid social change was flattened in the eighties, the Movement was dispersed and its remnants installed as the Left Behind of the Democratic Party. Leftist popular fronters disappeared into the labor movement to stave off the fascists. Enironmentalists relentlessly lobbied for the final legislative fix. Feminists served the Democrats in the name of Presidential power to make Supreme Court appointments. AfroAmericans were integrated - on the Disney Channel. The Peace Movement was openly robbed of its dividend while the Demomcrats fluttered their hands in dignified hopelessness. And, in a timidity that summed up the era, the Nader/Green Party succumed to the Anybuddy of Bush DLC fraud and on the national level went yellow to the kernal.
The Vacuum is now. A new alliance will be born, something I hopefully call the 7th International: the Libertarian Labor Green Rainbow Alliance!?! This space is reserved for mediations on this alliance.
It was the liberals who had overseen the birth of the National Security State. Truman accepted the paternity. He got the best bang by not passing the buck. But for his successor Adlai Stevenson it was not a baby but a hot potato. He prayed in public that the the buck in fact be passed from him.
Stevenson became the architype for the liberal's dignified method of defeat. His name is first in an inglorious list of losers whose names glow phosphoresently - Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Eagleton, Edwards, Carter, Humphrey, to name a few.
In their search for a stable ruling center to fob their power off upon, the liberals went neo. In their Urge to Power, the conservatives went tina (there is no alternative).
Rapid social change (good old Revolution Now) became the truly unthinkable. This was the best of all Darwinian worlds. The Haves and the Havemores were happily red in tooth and claw and black in the bottom line. For the havenots and havenevers, evolution was a slow, slower, slowest Chinese water torture, a working class tortoise that never caught up with the capitalist hare.
The Movement of the sixties and seventies formulated the terms of the overthrow of the 4 Horsemen of Bourgeois Democracy: classism, sexism, racisn and ageism. Eisenhower, the polidiot savant, called the cancerous growth the Military/Industrial/Political Complex. The 1st Kennedy, who was at once the last liberal and the first neoliberal, died of the contradiction. The 2nd Kennedy was killed for representing a fusion of the Movement and political party. This became the McGovern reform party - loaded down with quotas, aspirations and entitlements. This was killed by party bosses. Rule fell safely into the hands of the WORMS for whom a Strict Constitution and a Stricter God had made the world. (WORMS: White Old Rich Men)
Once the wave of rapid social change was flattened in the eighties, the Movement was dispersed and its remnants installed as the Left Behind of the Democratic Party. Leftist popular fronters disappeared into the labor movement to stave off the fascists. Enironmentalists relentlessly lobbied for the final legislative fix. Feminists served the Democrats in the name of Presidential power to make Supreme Court appointments. AfroAmericans were integrated - on the Disney Channel. The Peace Movement was openly robbed of its dividend while the Demomcrats fluttered their hands in dignified hopelessness. And, in a timidity that summed up the era, the Nader/Green Party succumed to the Anybuddy of Bush DLC fraud and on the national level went yellow to the kernal.
The Vacuum is now. A new alliance will be born, something I hopefully call the 7th International: the Libertarian Labor Green Rainbow Alliance!?! This space is reserved for mediations on this alliance.
