[NYTr] Revolution of Modern Art & the Modern Art of Revolution

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Situationist International Online
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/modernart.html

The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution

by Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray,
Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe

(1967, previously unpublished)

The Crisis of Modern Art: Dada and Surrealism

'NEVER BEFORE,' wrote Artaud, 'has there been so much talk about
civilisation and culture as today, when it is life itself that is
disappearing. And there is a strange parallel between the general
collapse of life, which underlies every specific symptom of
demoralisation, and this obsession with a culture which is designed to
domineer over life.' Modern Art is at a dead end. To be blind to this
fact implies a complete ignorance of the most radical theses of the
European avant-garde during the revolutionary upheavals of 1910-1925:
that art must cease to be a specialised and imaginary transformation of
the world and become the real transformation of lived experience itself.
Ignorance of this attempt to recreate the nature of creativity itself,
and above all its vicissitudes in Dada and Surrealism, has made the
whole development of modern art incoherent, chaotic and
incomprehensible.

With the Industrial Revolution, there began a change in the whole
definition of art slowly, often unconscioulsy, it changed from a
celebration of society and its ideologies to a project of total
subversion. From being the focus and guarantee of myth, "great" art
became an explosion at the centre of the mythic constellation. Out of
mythic time and space it produced a radical historical consciousness
which released and reassembled the real contradictions of bourgeois
"civilisation."

Even the antique became subversive in 50 years, art escaped from the
certainties of Augustan values and created its own revolutionary myth of
a primitive society. For David and Ledoux, the imperative was to capture
the forms of life and self-consciousness which had produced the culture
of the ancient world; to recreate rather than to imitate. The 19th
century was only to give that proposal a more demoniac and Dionysian
gloss.

The project of art for Blake, for Nietzsche became the
transvaluation of all values and the destruction of all that prevents
it. Art became negation: in Goya, in Beethoven, or in Gericault, one can
see the change from celebrant to subversive within the space of a
lifetime. But a change in the definition of art demanded a change in its
forms and the 19th century was marked by an accelerating and desperate
attempt at improvising new forms of artistic attack. Courbet began by
touting his pictures round the countryside in a marquee and ended in the
Commune by superintending the destruction of the Vendome column (the
century's most radical artistic art, which its author immediately
disowned).

After the Commune, artists suffered a collective loss of nerve. Mythic
time was reborn out of the womb of historical continuity, but it was the
mythic time of an isolated and finally obliterated individuality. In the
novel, Tolstoy or Conrad struggled to retain a sense of nothingness;
irony teetered over into despair; time stopped and insanity took over.
For the Symbolists, the evasion of history became a principle; they gave
up the struggle for new revolutionary forms in favor of a purely mythic
cult of the isolated artistic gesture. If it was impossible to paint the
proletariat, it was equally impossible to paint anything else. So art
had to be about nothing; life must exist for art's sake; the ugly and
intolerable truth, said Mallarme with complete disdain, is the "popular
form of beauty." The Symbolists lived on in a realm of an infinitely
elegant but stifling tautology. In Mallarme himself, the inescapable
subject of poetry is the death of being and the birth of abstract
consciousness: a consciousness at once multiform, perfect, magnificently
anti-dialectical and radically impotent.

In the end, for all its fury (and Symbolists and Anarchists worked
side-by-side in the 1890s) revolutionary art was caught in
contradictions. It could not or would not break free of the forms of
bourgeois culture as a whole. Its content and method could become
transformations of the world but, while art remained imprisoned within
the social spectacle, its transformations remained imaginary. Rather
than enter into direct social conflict with the reality it criticized,
it transferred the whole problem into an abstract and inoffensive sphere
where it functioned objectively as a force consolidating all it wanted
to destroy. Revolt against reality became the evasion of reality. Marx's
original critique of the genesis of religious myth and ideology applies
word-for-word to the rebellion of bourgeois art: it too "is at the same
time the expression of real distress and the protest against real
distress. It is the sigh of the oppresses creature, the heart of a
heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It
is the opium of the people" [Marx, Contribution to the critique of
Hegel's "Philosophy of Right"].

The separation and hostility between the "world" of art and the "world"
of everyday life finally exploded in Dada. "Life and art are One,"
proclaimed Tzara; "the modern artist does not paint, he creates
directly." But this upsurge of real, direct creativity had its own
contradictions. All the real creative possibilities of the time were
dependent on the free use of its real productive forces, on the free use
of its technology, from which the Dadaists, like everyone else, were
excluded. Only the possibility of total revolution could have liberated
Dada. Without it, Dada was condemned to vandalism and, ultimately, to
nihilism unable to get past the stage of denouncing an alienated
culture and the self-sacrificial forms of expression which it imposed on
its artists and their audience alike. It painted pictures on the Mona
Lisa, instead of raising the Louvre. Dada flared up and burnt out as an
art sabotaging art in the name of reality and reality in the name of
art. A tour de force of nihilistic gaiety. The variety, exuberance and
audacity of the ludic creativity it liberated, vital enough to transmute
the most banal object or event into something vivid and unforeseen, only
discovered its real orientation in the revolutionary turmoil of Germany
at the end of the First World War. In Berlin, where its expression was
most coherent, Dada offered a brief glimpse of a new praxis beyond both
art and politics: the revolution of everyday life.

Surrealism was initially an attempt to forge a positive movement out of
the devastation left in the wake of Dada. The original Surrealist group
understood clearly enough, at least during its heyday, that social
repression is coherent and is repeated on every level of experience and
that the essential meaning of revolution could only be the liberation
and immediate gratification of everyone's repressed will to live the
liberation of a subjectivity seething with revolt and spontaneous
creativity, with sovereign re-inventions of the world in terms of
subjective desire, whose existence Freud had revealed to them (but whose
repression and sublimation Freud, as a specialist accepting the
permanence of bourgeois society as a whole, could only believe to be
irrevocable). They saw quite rightly that the most vital role a
revolutionary avant-garde could play was to create a coherent group
experimenting with a new lifestyle, drawing on new techniques, which
were simultaneously self-expressive and socially disruptive, of
extending the perimeters of lived experience. Art was a series of free
experiments in the construction of a new libertarian order.

But their gradual lapse into traditional forms of expression the
self-same forms whose pretensions to immortality the Dadaists had
already sent up, mercilessly, once and for all proved to be their
downfall: their acceptance of a fundamentally reformist position and
their integration within the spectacle. They tried to introduce the
subjective dimension of revolution into the communist movement at the
very moment when its Stalinist hierarchy had been perfected. They tried
to use conventional artistic forms at the very moment when the
disintegration of the spectacle, for which they themselves were partly
responsible, had turned the most scandalous gestures of spectacular
revolt into eminently marketable commodities. As all the real
revolutionary possibilities of the period were wiped out, suffocated by
bureaucratic reformism or murdered by the firing squad, the Surrealist
attempt to supersede art and politics in a completely new type of
revolutionary self-expression steadily degenerated into a travesty of
its original elements: the mostly celestial art and the most abject
communism.

The Transformation of Poverty and the Transformation of the
Revolutionary Project

FROM THEN till now... nothing. For nearly half a century, art has
repeated itself, each repetition feebler, more inane than the last. Only
today, with the first signs of a more highly evolved revolt within a
more highly developed capitalism, can the radical project of modern art
be taken up again and taken up more coherently. It is not enough for art
to seek its realisation in practice; practice must also seek its art.
The bourgeois artists, rebelling against the mediocrity of mere
survival, which was all their class could guarantee, were always
tragically at cross-purposes with the traditional revolutionary
movement. While the artists from Keats to the Marx Brothers were
trying to invent the richest possible experience of an absent life, the
working class at least on the level of their official theory and
organisation were struggling for the very survival the artists
rejected. Only now, with the Welfare State, with the gradual accession
of the whole proletariat to hitherto 'bourgeois' standards of comfort
and leisure, can the two movements converge and lose their traditional
animosity. As, in mechanical succession, the problems of material
survival are solved and as life, in an equally mechanical succession,
becomes more and more disgusting, all revolt becomes essentially a
revolt against the quality of experience. One knows very few people
dying of hunger. But everyone one knows is dying of boredom.

By now it has become painfully evident to everyone apart from a gag
radical left that it is not one or another isolated aspect of
contemporary civilisation that is horrifying, but our own lives as a
whole, as they are lived on an everyday level. The utter debacle of the
left today lies in its failure to notice, let alone understand, the
transformation of poverty which is the basic characteristic of life in
the highly industrialised countries. Poverty is still conceived in terms
of the 19th century proletariat its brutal struggle to survive in the
teeth of exposure, starvation and disease rather than in terms of the
inability to live, the lethargy, the boredom, the isolation, the anguish
and the sense of complete meaninglessness which are eating like a cancer
through its 20th century counterpart. The left blithely accepts all the
mystifications of spectacular consumption. They cannot see that
consumption is no more than the corollary of modern production
functioning as both its economic stabilisation and its ideological
justification and that the one sector is just as alienated as the
other. They cannot see that all the pseudo variety of leisure masks a
single experience: the reduction of everyone to the role of passive and
isolated spectators, forced to surrender their own individual desires
and to accept a purely fictitious and mass-produced surrogate. Within
this perspective, the left has become no more than the avant-garde of
the permanent reformism to which neo-capitalism is condemned. Revolution,
on the contrary, demands a total change, and today this can only mean to
supersede the present system of work and leisure en bloc.

The revolutionary project, as dreamed among the dark satanic mills of
consumer society, can only be the creation of a new lease of life as a
whole and the subordination of the productive forces to this end. Life
must become the game desire plays with itself. But the rediscovery and
the realisation of human desires is impossible without a critique of the
phantastic form in which these desires have always found the illusory
realisation which allowed their real repression to continue. Today this
means that 'art' phantasy erected into a systematic culture has
become Public Enemy Number One. It also means that the traditional
philistinism of the left is no longer just an incidental embarrassment.
It has become deadly. From now on, the possibility of a new
revolutionary critique of society depends on the possibility of a sex
revolutionary critique of culture and vice versa. There is no question
of subordinating art to politics or politics to art. The question is of
superseding both of them insofar as they are separated forms.

No project, however phantastic, can any longer be dismissed as
'Utopian.' The power of industrial productivity has grown immeasurably
faster than any of the 19th century revolutionaries foresaw. The speed
at which automation is being developed and applied heralds the
possibility of the complete abolition of forced labor the absolute
pre-condition of real human emancipation and, at the same time, the
creation of a new, purely ludic type of free activity, whose achievement
demands a critique of the alienation of 'free' creativity in the work of
art. Art must be short-circuited. The whole accumulated power of the
productive forces must be put directly at the service of man's
imagination and will to live. At the service of the countless dreams,
desires and half-formed projects which are our common obsession and our
essence, and which we all mutely surrender in exchange for one or another
worthless substitute. Our wildest fantasies are the richest elements of
our reality. They must be given real, not abstract powers. Dynamite,
feudal castles, jungles, liquor, helicopters, laboratories...
everything and more must pass into their service. "The world has long
haboured the dream of something. Today if it merely becomes conscious of
it, it can possess it really." (Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843)

The Realisation of Art and the Permanent Revolution of Everyday Life

"The goal of the Situationists is immediate participation in a varied
and passionate life, through moments which are both transient and
consciously controlled. The value of these moments can only lie in their
real effect. The Situationists see cultural activity, from the point of
view of the totality, as a method of experimental construction of
everyday life, which can be developed indefinitely with the extension of
leisure and the disappearance of the division of labour (and, first and
foremost, the artistic division of labour). Art can stop being an
interpretation of sensations and become an immediate creation of more
highly evolved sensations. The problem is how to produce ourselves, and
not the things which enslave us." --"Theses on Cultural Revolution,"
Internationale Situationniste No. 1, 1958

IT IS NOT enough to burn the museums. They must also be sacked. Past
creativity must be freed from the forms into which it has been ossified
and brought back to life. Everything of value in art has always cried
aloud to be made real and to be lived. This 'subversion' of traditional
art is, obviously, merely part of the whole art of subversion we must
master (cf. Ten Days That Shook the University). Creativity, since Dada,
has not been a matter of producing anything more but of learning to use
what has already been produced.

Contemporary research into the factors 'conditioning' human life poses
implicitly the question of man's integral determination of his own
nature. If the results of this research are brought together and
synthesized under the aegis of the cyberneticians, then man will be
condemned to a New Ice Age. A recent 'Commission on the Year 2000' is
already gleefully discussing the possibilities of 'programmed dreams and
human liberation for medical purposes.' (Newsweek, 16/10/67) If, on the
contrary, these 'means of conditioning' are seized by the revolutionary
masses, then creativity will have found its real tools: the possibilities
of everyone freely shaping their own experience will become literally
demiurgic. From now on, Utopia is not only an eminently practical project,
it is a vitally necessary one.

The construction of situations is the creation of real time and space,
and the widest integrated field before it lies in the form of the city.
The city expresses, concretely, the prevailing organisation of everyday
life. The nightmare of the contemporary megalopolis space and time
engineered to isolate, exhaust and abstract us has driven the lesson
home to everybody, and its very pitilessness has begun to engender a new
utopian consciousness. "If man is formed by circumstances, then these
circumstances must be formed by man." (Marx, The Holy Family) If all the
factors conditioning us are co-ordinated and unified by the structure of
the city, then the question of mastering our own experience becomes one
of mastering the conditioning inherent in the city and revolutionising
its use. This is the context within which man can begin, experimentally,
to create the circumstances that create him: to create his own immediate
experience. These "fields of lived experience" will supersede the
antagonism between town and country which has dominated human life up to
now. They will be environments which transform individual and group
experience, and are themselves transformed as a result; they will be
cities whose structure affords, concretely, the means of access to every
possible experience, and, simultaneously, every possible experience of
these means of access. Dynamically inter-related and evolving wholes.
Game-cities. In this context, Fourier's dictum that "the equilibrium of
the passions depends upon the constant confrontation of opposites"
should be understood as an architectural principle. (The subversion of
past culture as a whole finds its focus in the cities. So many neglected
themes the labyrinth, for example remain to be explored.) What does
Utopia mean today? To create the real time and space within which all
our desires can be realised and all of our reality desired. To create
the total work of art.

Unitary urbanism is a critique, not a doctrine, of cities. It is the
living critique of cities by their inhabitants: the permanent
qualitative transformation, made by everyone, of social space and time.
Thus, rather than say that Utopia is the total work of art, it would be
more accurate to say that Utopia is the richest and most complex domain
serving total creativity. This also means that any specific propositions
we can make today are of purely critical value. On an immediate
practical level, experimentation with a new positive distribution of
space and time cannot be dissociated from the general problems of
organisation and tactics confronting us. Clearly a whole urban guerilla
will have to be invented. We must learn to subvert existing cities, to
grasp all the possible and the least expected uses of time and space
they contain. Conditioning must be thrown in reverse. It can only be out
of these experiments, out of the whole development of the revolutionary
movement, that a real revolutionary urbanism can grow. On a rudimentary
level, the blazing ghettoes of the USA already convey something of the
primitive splendor, hazardousness and poetry of the environments
demanded by the new proletariat. Detroit in flames was a purely Utopian
affirmation. A city burnt to make a negro holiday... shadows of most
terrible, yet great and glorious things to come....

The Work of Art: A Spectacular Commodity

Unfortunately, it is not only the avant-garde of revolutionary art and
politics which has a different conception of the role to be played by
artistic creativity. "The problem is to get the artist onto the workshop
floor among other research workers, rather than outside industry
producing sculptures," remarks the Committee of the Art Placement Group,
which is sponsored by, amongst others, the Tate Gallery, the Institute
of Directors, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Evening Standard,
1/2/67). In fact, industrialisation of 'art' is already a fait accompli.
The irreversible expansion of the modern economy has been forcing it to
accord an increasingly important position for a long time now. Already
the substance of the tertiary sector of the economy the one expanding
the most rapidly is almost exclusively 'cultural.' Alienated society,
by revealing its perfect compatibility with the work of art and its
growing dependence upon it, has betrayed the alienation of art in the
harshest and least flattering light possible. Art, like the rest of the
spectacle, is no more than the organisation of everyday life in a form
where its true nature can at most be dismissed and turned into the
appearance of its opposite: where exclusion can be made to seem
participation, where one-way transmission can be made to seem
communication, where loss of reality can be made to seem realisation.

Most of the crap passed off as culture today is no more than dismembered
fragments reproduced mechanically without the slightest concern for
their original significance of the debris left by the collapse of
every world culture. This rubbish can be marketed simply as
historico-aesthetic bric-a-brac or, alternatively, various past styles
and attitudes can be amalgamated, up-dated and plastered
indiscriminately over an increasingly wide range of products as
haphazard and auto-destructive fashions. But the importance of art in
the spectacle today cannot be reduced to the mere fact that it offers a
relatively unexploited accumulation of commodities. Marshall McLuhan
remarks: "Our technology is, also, ahead of its time, if we reckon by
the ability to recognise it for what it is. To prevent undue wreckage in
society, the artist tends now to move from the ivory tower to the
control tower of society. Just as higher education is no longer a frill
or a luxury, but a stark need for production in the shaping and
structure created by electric technology." And Galbraith, even more
clearly, speaks about the great need "to subordinate economic to
aesthetic goals." (Guardian, 22/2/67)

Art has a specific role to play in the spectacle. Production, once it is
no longer answering any real needs at all, can only justify itself in
purely aesthetic terms. The work of art the completely gratuitous
product with a purely formal coherence provides the strongest ideology
of pure contemplation possible today. As such it is the model commodity.
A life which has no sense apart from contemplation of its own suspension
in a void finds its expression in the gadget: a permanently
superannuated product whose only interest lies in its abstract
technico-aesthetic ingenuity and whose only use lies in the status it
confers on those consuming its latest remake. Production as a whole will
become increasingly 'artistic' insofar as it loses any other raison
d'etre.

Rated slightly above the run-of-the-mill consumers of traditional
culture is a sort of mass avant-garde of consumers who wouldn't miss a
single episode of the latest 'revolt' churned out by the spectacle: the
latest solemn 80 minute flick of 360 variegated bare arses, the latest
manual of how to freak out without tears, the latest napalm-twisted
monsters air-expressed to the local Theatre of Fact. One builds up
resistance to the spectacle, and, like any other drug, its continued
effectiveness demands increasingly suicidal doses. Today, with everyone
all but dead from boredom, the spectacle is essentially a spectacle of
revolt. Its function is quite simply to distract attention from the only
real revolt: revolt against the spectacle. And, apart from this one
point, the more extreme the scandal the better. Any revolt within the
spectacular forms, however sincere subjectively from The Who to
Marat/Sade is absorbed and made to function in exactly the opposite
perspective to the one that was intended. A baffled 'protest vote'
becomes more and more overtly nihilistic. Censorship. Hash. Vietnam. The
same old careerism in the same old rackets. Today the standard way of
maintaining conformity is by means of illusory revolts against it. The
final form taken by the Provos Saturday night riots protected by the
police, put in quarantine, functioning as Europe's premier avant-garde
tourist attraction illustrates very clearly how resilient the spectacle
can be.

Beyond this, there are a number of recent cultural movements which are
billed as a coherent development from the bases of modern art as a
contemporary avant-garde and which are in fact no more than the
falsification of the high points of modern art and their integration.
Two forms seem to be particularly representative: reformism and
nihilism.

The Phoney Avant-Garde

ATTEMPTS TO reform the artistic spectacle, to make it more coherent and,
inseparably, to resurrect the illusion of participation in it, are ten a
penny. For a time, separated forms sound, light, jazz, dance,
painting, film, poetry, politics, theatre sculpture, architecture, etc
have been brought together, in various juxtapositions, in the mixed and
multi-media shows. In kinetic art we are promised the apotheosis of the
process. A current Russian group declares: "We propose to exploit all
possibilities, all aesthetic and technical means, all physical and
chemical phenomena, even all kinds of art as our methods of artistic
expression." (Form, No. 4) The specialist always dreams of 'broadening
his field.' Likewise the obsessive attempts to make the 'audience'
'participate.' No one cares to point out that these two concepts are
blatantly contradictory, that every artistic form, like every other
prevailing social form, is explicitly designed to prohibit even the
intervention, let alone the control, of the vast majority of people.
Endless examples could be cited. Last winter saw "Vietnamese Free
Elections" billed as an experiment in creating "total involvement" in
the Vietnamese situation through a fusion of political and dramatic
form, etc. "Actors are not wanted," it was stated. "This is a new
exercise in audience participation" that came with the ticket. "If you
want to speak, hold up your hand. When you are recognised by the
chairman, you must give your real name and the fictional occupation
entered on your background sheet.... During the course of the
meeting, you are operating as a fictional character and not as a
spokesman for your personally held beliefs" (emphasis in original). The
Happening is the general matrix of participation art and the Happening
is where it becomes obvious that nothing ever happens. Everyone has lost
themselves as totally as they have lost everyone else. Without the drugs,
it could be explosive.

Cop art, cop artists. The whole lot moves towards a fusion of forms in a
total environmental spectacle complete with various forms of
prefabricated and controlled participation. It is just an integral part
of the all-encompassing reforming of modern capitalism. Behind it looms
the whole weight of a society trying to obscure the increasingly
transparent exclusion and repression it imposes on everyone, to restore
some semblance of colour, variety and meaning to leisure and work, to
"organise participation in something in which it is impossible to
participate." As such, these artists should be treated the same way as
police-state psychiatrists, cyberneticians, and contemporary architects.
Small wonder their avant-garde cultural 'events' are so heavily policed.

Anything art can do, life can do better. A journalist describes the
sense of complete reality of driving a static racing car in an ambiance
consisting solely of a colour film, which responded to every touch of
the steering and acceleration as though he were really speeding round a
race track. Even the sensations of a 120 mph smash could be simulated
(Daily Express, 18/1/66) Expo '67, the Holy City of science fiction,
boasts a three-million-buck 'Gyrotron' designed "to lift its passengers
into a facsimile of outer space and then dunk them in a fiery volcano..
.. We orbit up an invisible track. Glowing around us are spinning
planets, comets, galaxies... man-made satellites, Telstars, moon
rockets... vooming in our cars are electronic undulations, deep beeps
and astral snores." Finally, the 'participants' are plunged down a "red
incinerator, surrounded by simulated lava, steam and demonic shrieks"
(Life, 15/5/67) Reinforced by the sort of conditioning made possible by
the discoveries of the kinetic artists, such techniques could ensure an
unprecedented measure of control. Sutavision, an abstract form of colour
TV, already mass-marketed, offers to provide "wonderful relaxation
possibilities" giving "a wide series of phantasies" and functioning as
"part of a normal home or business office." "Radiant colours moving in an
almost hypnotic rhythm across the screen... wherein one can see any
number of intriguing spectacles." Box three, a further refinement of TV,
can manipulate basic mood changes through the rhythms and the frequency
of the light patterns employed (Observer Magazine, 23/10/66) Still more
sinister is the combination of total kinetic environments and a stiff
dose of acid. "We try to vaporise the mind," says a psychedelic artist,
"by bombing the senses." The Us Company [a commune of painters, poets,
film-makers, teachers and weavers that lived and worked together in an
abandoned church in Garneville, New York] artists call their congenial
wrap-around a "be-in" because the spectator is to exist in the show,
rather than look at it. The audience becomes disorientated from their
normal time sense and preoccupations.... The spectator feels he is
being transported to mystical heights." And this "is invading not only
museums and colleges, but cultural festivals, discotheques, movie houses
and fashion shows" (Life, 3/10/66) To date, Leary is the only person to
have attempted to pull all this together. Having reduced everyone to a
state of hyper-impressionable plasticity, he incorporated a backwoods myth
of the modern-scientific-truth-underlying-all-world-religions, a cretin's
catechism broadcast persuasively at the same time as it was expressed by
the integral manipulation of sense data. Leary's personal vulgarity
should not blind anyone to the possibilities implicit in this. A crass
manipulation of subjective experience accepted ecstatically as a
mystical revelation.

"All this art is finished.... Squares on the wall. Shapes on the
floor. Emptiness. Empty rooms" (Warhol to a reporter from Vogue).
Nihilism is the second most widespread form of contemporary
'avant-garde' culture; the morass stretches from playwrights like
Ionesco and film-makers like Antonioni, through novelists like
Robbe-Grillet and Burroughs, to the paintings and sculpture of the pop,
destructive and auto-destructive artists. All re-enact a Dadaist
revulsion from contemporary life but their revolt, such as it is, is
purely passive., theatrical and aesthetic, shorn of any of the
passionate fury, horror or desperation which would lead to a really
destructive praxis. Neo-Dada, whatever its formal similarities to Dada,
is re-animated by a spirit diametrically opposed to that of the original
Dadaist groups. "The only truly disgusting things," said Picabia, "are
Art and Anti-Art. Wherever Art rears its head, life disappears."
Neo-Dada, far from being a terrified outcry at the almost complete
disappearance of life, is, on the contrary, an attempt to confer a
purely aesthetic value on its absence and on the schizophrenic
incoherence of its surrogates. It invites us to contemplate the
wreckage, ruin and confusion surrounding us, and not to take up arms in
the gaiety of the world's subversion, pillage and total overthrow. Their
culture of the absurd reveals only the absurdity of their culture.

Purely contemplative nihilism is no more the special province of artists
than is modern reformism. In fact, neo-Dada lags way behind the
misadventures of the commodity-economy itself every aspect of life
today could pass as its own parody. The Naked Lunch pales before any of
the mass media. Its real significance is quite different. For pop art is
not only, as Black Mask remarks, the apotheosis of capitalist reality:
it is the last ditch attempt to shore up the decomposition of the
spectacle. Decay has reached the point where it must be made attractive
in its own right. If nothing has any value, then nothing must become
valuable. The bluff may be desperate but no one dares to call it, here
or anywhere else. And so Marvel comics become as venerable as Pope. The
function of neo-Dada is to provide an aesthetic and ideological alibi
for the coming period, to which modern commerce is condemned, of
increasingly pointless and self-destructive products: the
consumption/anti-consumption of the life/anti-life. Galbraith's
subordination of economic to aesthetic goals is perfectly summed up in
the Mystic Box. "Throw switch 'on.' Box rumbles and quivers. Lid slowly
rises, a hand emerges and pushes switch off. Hand disappears as lid
slams shut. Does absolutely nothing but switch off!" The nihilism of
modern art is merely an introduction to the art of modern nihilism.

The Intelligentsia Split in Two

THESE TWO movements the attempt to reform the spectacle and the
attempt to arrest its crisis as purely contemplative nihilism are
distinct but in no way contradictory manoeuvres. In both cases, the
function of the artist is merely to give aesthetic consecration to what
has already taken place. His job is purely ideological. The role played
today by the work of art has dissociated everything in art which awoke
real creativity and revolt from everything which imposed passivity and
conformism. Its revolutionary and its alienated elements have sprung
apart and become the living denial of one another. Art as commodity has
become the arch-enemy of all real creativity.

The resolution of the ambiguity of culture is also the resolution of the
ambiguity of the intelligentsia. The present cultural set-up is
potentially split into two bitterly opposed factions. The majority of
the intelligentsia has, quite crudely, sold out. At the same time, its
truly dissident and imaginative elements have refused all collaboration,
all productivity, within the forms tolerated by social power and are
tending more and more to become indistinguishable from the rest of the
new lumpenproletariat in their open contempt and derision for the
'values' of consumer society. While the way of life of the servile
intelligentsia is the living denial of anything remotely resembling
either creativity or intelligence, the rebel intelligentsia is becoming
caught up in the reality of disaffection and revolt, refusing to work
and inevitably faced, point blank, with a radical reappraisal of the
relationship between creativity and everyday life. Frequenting the
lumpen, they will learn to use other weapons than their imagination. One
of our first moves must be to envenom the latent hostility between these
two factions. It shouldn't be too difficult. The demoralisation of the
servile intelligentsia is already proverbial. The contradictions between
fake glamour and the reality of their mental celebrity are too flagrant
to pass unperceived, even by those who are, indisputably, the most
stupid people in contemporary society.

Revolt, the Spectacle and the Game

THE REAL creativity of the times is at the antipodes of anything
officially acknowledged to be 'art.' Art has become an integral part of
contemporary society and a 'new' art can only exist as a supersession of
contemporary society as a whole. It can only exist as the creation of
new forms of activity. As such, ['new' art] has formed an integral part
of every eruption of real revolt over the last decade. All have
expressed the same furious and baffled will to live, to live every
possible experience to the full which, in the context of a society
which suppresses life in all its forms, can only mean to construct
experience and to construct it against the given order. To create
immediate experience as purely hedonistic and experimental enjoyment of
itself can be expressed by only one social form the game and it is
the desire to play that all real revolt has asserted against the uniform
passivity of this society of survival and the spectacle. The game is the
spontaneous way everyday life enriches and develops itself; the game is
the conscious form of the supersession of spectacular art and politics.
It is participation, communication and self-realisation resurrected in
their adequate form. It is the means and the end of total revolution.

The reduction of all lived experience to the production and consumption
of commodities is the hidden system by which all revolt is engendered,
and the tide rising in all the highly industrialised countries can only
throw itself more and more violently against the commodity-form.
Moreover, this confirmation can only become increasingly embittered as
the integration effected by power is revealed as more and more clearly
to be the re-conversion of revolt into a spectacular commodity (q.v.,
the transparence of the conforming non-conformity dished up for modern
youth). Life is revealed as a war between the commodity and the ludic.
As a pitiless game. And there are only two ways to subordinate the
commodity to the desire to play: either by destroying it, or by
subverting it.

The Real Avant-Garde: The Game-Revolt of Delinquency, Petty Crime and
the New Lumpen

THE JUVENILE delinquents not the pop artists are the true inheritors
of Dada. Instinctively grasping their exclusion from the whole of social
life, they have denounced its products, ridiculed, degraded and
destroyed them. A smashed telephone, a burnt car, a terrorised cripple
are the living denial of the 'values' in the name of which life is
eliminated. Delinquent violence is a spontaneous overthrow of the
abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the
delinquents' inability to grasp any possibility of really changing
things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely
nihilistic. They can neither understand nor find a coherent form for the
direct participation in the reality they have discovered, for the
intoxication and sense of purpose they feel, for the revolutionary
values they embody. The Stockholm riots, the Hell's Angels, the riots of
Mods and Rockers all are the assertion of the desire to play in a
situation where it is totally impossible. All reveal quite clearly the
relationship between pure destructivity and the desire to play: the
destruction of the game can only be avenged by destruction.
Destructivity is the only passionate use to which one can put everything
that remains irremediably separated. It is the only game the nihilist
can play; the bloodbath of the 120 Days of Sodom proletarianised along
with the rest.

The vast escalation of petty crime spontaneous, everyday crime on a
mass level marks a qualitatively new stage in contemporary class
conflict: the turning point between pure destruction of the commodity
and the stage of its subversion. Shoplifting, for example, beyond being
a grass-roots refusal of hierarchically organised distribution, is also
a spontaneous rebuttal of the use of both product and productive force.
The sociologists and floorwalkers concerned neither group being noted
for a particularly ludic attitude towards life have failed to spot
either that people enjoy the act of stealing, or, through an even darker
piece of dialectical foul-play, that people are beginning to steal
because they enjoy it. Theft is, in fact, a summary overthrow of the
whole structure of the spectacle; it is the subordination of the
inanimate object, from whose free use we are withheld, to the living
sensations it can awake when played with imaginatively within a specific
situation. And the modesty of something as small as shoplifting is
deceptive. A teenage girl interviewed recently remarked: "I often get
this fancy that the world stands still for an hour and I go into a shop
and get rigged" (Evening Standard, 16/8/66). Alive, in embryo, is our
whole concept of subversion: the bestowal of a whole new use value on
this useless world and against this useless world, subordinated to the
sovereign pleasure of subjective creativity.

The formation of the new lumpen prefigures several features of an
all-encompassing subversion. On the one hand, the lumpen is the sphere
of complete social breakdown of apathy, negativity and nihilism but,
at the same time, in so far as it defines itself by its refusal to work
and its attempt to use its clandestine leisure in the invention of new
types of free activity, [the lumpen] is fumbling, however clumsily, with
the quick of the revolutionary supersession now possible. As such it
could quickly become social dynamite. It only needs to realise the
possibility of everyday life being transformed, objectively, for its
last illusions to lose their power, e.g., the futile attempt to
revitalize immediate experience subjectively, by heightening its
perception with drugs, etc. The Provo movement in 1966 was the first
groping attempt of this new, and still partly heterogeneous, social
force to organise itself into a mass movement aimed at the qualitative
transformation of everyday life. At its highest moment, [the Provo
movement]'s upsurge of disruptive self-expression superseded both
traditional art and traditional politics. It collapsed not through any
essential irrelevance of the social forces it represented, but through
their complete lack of any real political consciousness: through their
blindness to their own hierarchical organisation and through their
failure to grasp the full extent of the crisis of contemporary society
and the staggering libertarian possibilities it conceals.

Initially, the new lumpen will probably be our most important theatre of
operations. We must enter it as a power against it and precipitate its
crisis. Ultimately, this can only mean to start a real movement between
the lumpen and the rest of the proletariat: their conjunction will
define the revolution. In terms of the lumpen itself, the first thing to
do is to dissociate the rank-and-file from the incredible crock of shit
raised up, like a monstrance, by their leaders and ideologists. The
false intelligentsia from the CIA-subsidised torpor of the latest New
Left, to the sanctimonious little bits of International Times are a
New Establishment whose tenure depends on the success with which they
can confront the most way-out point of social and intellectual revolt.
The parody they stage can only arouse a growing radicalism and fury on
the part of those they claim to represent. The Los Angeles Free Press,
distilling their experience of revolt in an article aptly entitled To
Survive in the Streets, could in all seriousness conclude: "Summing up:
Dress warm, keep clean and healthy, eat a balanced diet, live indoors
and avoid crime. Living in the streets can be fun if you conscientiously
study the rules of the game." (Reprinted in The East Village Other,
15/6/67). Hippie racketeers should certainly steer clear of public
places, come the day. The poesie faite par tous has been known to be
somewhat trigger-happy in the past.

Revolution as a Game

THE NEW revolutionary movement can be no more than the organisation of
popular revolt into its most coherent, its richest form. And there is no
organisation to date which would not completely betray it. All previous
political critiques of the repressive hierarchy engendered by the past
revolutionary argument that of Solidarity, for example have
completely missed the point: they were not focused on precisely what it
was that this hierarchy repressed and perverted in the form of passive
militancy. In the context of the radical 'ethics' still bogged down in
singularly distasteful forms of sub-Christian masochism, the ludic
aspects of the revolution cannot be over-emphasised. Revolution is
essentially a game and one plays it for the pleasure involved. Its
dynamic is a subjective fury to live, not altruism. It is totally
opposed to any form of self-sacrificial subordination of oneself to a
cause to Progress, to the Proletariat, to Other People. Any such
attitude is diametrically opposed to the revolutionary appreciation of
reality: it is no more than an ideological extension of religion for the
use by the 'revolutionary' leaderships in justifying their own power and
in repressing every sign of popular creativity.

The game is the destruction of the sacred whether it be the sanctity
of Jesus or the santity of the electric mixer and the Wonderloaf.
Tragedy, said Lukacs, is a game played in the sight of godlessness. The
true form of godlessness will be the final achievement of revolution
the end of the illusory and all its forms, the beginning of real life
and its direct self-consciousness.

The revolutionary movement must be a game as much as the society it
prefigures. Ends and means cannot be disassociated. We are concerned
first and foremost with the construction of our own lives. Today, this
can only mean the total destruction of power. Thus the crucial
revolutionary problem is the creation of a praxis in which
self-expression and social disruption are one and the same thing: of
creating a style of self-realisation which can only spell the destruction
of everything which blocks total realisation. From another point of view,
this is the problem of creating the coherent social form of what is
initially and remains essentially an individual and subjective revolt.
Only Marx's original project, the creation of the total man, of an
individual reappropriating the entire experience of the species, can
supersede the individual vs. Society dualism by which hierarchical power
holds itself together while it holds us apart. If it fails in this, then
the new revolutionary movement will merely build an even more labyrinthine
illusory community; or, alternatively, it will shatter into an isolated
and ultimately self-destructive search for kicks. If it succeeds, then it
will permeate society as a game that everyone can play. There is nothing
left today that can withstand a coherent opposition once it has
established itself as such. Life and revolution will be invented together
or not at all.

All the creativity of the time will grow from this movement and it is in
this perspective that our own experiments will be made and should be
understood. The end of this process will not merely be the long overdue
end of this mad, disintegrating civilisation. It will be the end of
pre-history itself. Man stands on the verge of the greatest breakthrough
ever made in the human appropriation of nature. Man is the world of man
and a new civilisation can only be based on man's free and experimental
creation of his own world and his own creation. This creation will no
longer accept any internal division or separation. Life will be the
creation of life itself. The total man will be confronted only with his
ever-increasing appropriation of nature, of his own nature, finally
elaborated, in all of its beauty and terror, as our 'worthy opponent' in
a ludic conflict where everything is possible.

top...@toplab.org
http://www.toplab.org

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