continuoustext

ANTI-UTOPIAN (October 2007 to January 2008)
A bunch of Autonomous Nationalists making street art: their symbol---the Antifa's logo, red flag over black flag, reversed: black over red, same flags.
Stencils, graffiti, posters, stickers.
Instant self-historification; videoed & photoed for the world white web.
Dressed, dressed up, in the whole black bloc aesthetics: Che Guevara fetishism, Palestinian kuffiyeh scarves, skate punk style.
Signifiers are never rooted in their signified; signifiers are never floating.
Stolen.
Signs are always old.
Second-hand; vintage; done; redone; dead; revived.
We all know this.
It's even embarrassing to say it.
Blush.
We want something...other.
I don't say something...new.
Just something.
Some of us want something else than self-historification.
Well, we want something different than...autohistorification---in a general sense: history producing itself---.
Weren't we supposed to be made by history & make history?
Hey, Hegel---answer that.
Or should it be 'Marx, man---answer that'?
We've been spoon-fed theories on the history machine.
So boring---the texts, their topic.
History used to be a nightmare you tried to wake up from.
Which imply a conscious state of mind to wake up to.
We can't even be nostalgic for that trajectory by now.
History is just a mechanism like anything else; maybe incomprehensible, but what isn't?
Anyways, I'm bored with talking out through my clenched pathos.
Melancholy is anger at the inability of signs to function flawlessly; to cover perfectly what they are to signal.
Melancholy is internalised anger.
Melancholy is an eating disorder---bulimia, anorexia, or 'plain' over-eating: no difference.
Wanting more than you can get; being furious you can't get it.
There's a drive for power there.
Not quite that of the mystic, turned inward, away from any object; the will to power of wanting to be one with God.
The saints are ecstatic, euphoric…even in their grief.
Like suicide-bombers.
While the melancholic only can give the world the silent treatment...or art.
Communicative silence...or communication in itself.
Art is the form/content of communication---working on the form/content of its information.
Which doesn't mean art can't transport information effectively.
It's just not a manual.
Nobody ever really understands manuals anyways.
That's because technology sucks.
You know, come to think of it: 'technology' is just another word for 'it doesn't work (damn it)'.
Which probably is the only vaguely optimistic thing you can say about the technology of manufacturing-society & the technological run-over of being, daily life & biological existence...as we know it.
Not that any kind of return to a technologically low-level society is possible.
Well, not if you're not into genocide so massive it will make the Great Leader, StalinMaoPolPot, look like Mr. Nice Guy.
Which explains the 3rd Way/Third Positionists into anarcho-primitivism...the National-Bolsheviks into minarchism ('minimal statism')...the Nazi-Maoists into Islamism.
No, honestly! these kinda MFs really exist.
There are self-styled Anarcho-Nazis, National-Marxists, National-Communists, Social-Nationalists, ultra left renegade Holocaust deniers, out there, too. &c., &c.
Haven’t run across any National-Councilists or National-Situationists yet, but that’s coming sooner or later I’m sure.
It's just so easy for the far right to operate within discourse-implosions, sign-senility, escapist thought-experiments.
For the rest of the political spectrum it just ain’t.
Except in the safe zone of entertainment/art: speculative fiction (sci-fi, fantasy).
It's been said we live in science fiction.
Well, the rightwing fringe does---we don't.
The religious cultists & conspiracy buffs live in the fantasy genre---we don’t.
The geopolitical 'Eurasianists' don't even hide it: they carry black flags with the 8-arrowed chaos symbol---which stems from Michael Moorcock’s fantasy pulps & was spread in the underground by the Chaos Magick movement.
The Russian Eurasianists support Putin, no less...after all his system has been described as 'anonymous Stalinism' so why not?
Another far-right variation on the chaos symbol is a white arrow cross on top of a black one---along with the Third Position Celtic cross on top of the red/black star of Anarcho-Syndicalism: National-Anarchism---think Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden---.
In the 20th century Fascism preyed on revolutionary social movements, leftist statism & bourgeois imperialism: the forces of industrial modernity.
Now it's the weaknesses of the information society.
Talking about the populist politicians, the nationalist parties, here.
Forget about the fringe coteries, the elitist activists, now.
’Finally’ the reader says.
If there is one...at least.
I ask myself what's the difference between the populists of the ’postmodern’ society & the old ones of the mass society?
Populism itself is strangely unchanged.
What’s new is the target, the chosen enemy, the intended victim.
Oh you know, old-style populism hated the Jewish citizens:
The Jew represented modernity---revolution, enlightenment, democracy, class war, capitalism, socialism, anarchism, liberalism---.
New-style populism targets the emigrant:
The emigrant represents pre-modernity caricatured---the cluster-fåckers from the steppes---.
We all know that too well.
The interesting thing is how populism operates after the age of the masses.
I said 'anonymous Stalinism'.
Then there was 'liberalist authoritarianism'---role model: Pinochet's Chile, the economy reorganized by Milton Friedman's pupils, 'the Chicago School'...& Carl Schmidt as theoretical alibi.
A couple of late 1990s attempts at describing what was being born.
The first describing the regime of post-Soviet Russia & its minions.
The second defining the paradigm of Singapore & Taiwan...plus Hong Kong & Shanghai.
The latter two combining with the Red-Imperial Confucianist meritocratic hierarchy of celestial China.
Modernity after mass-society, post-industrial modernity, modernity with a new 'elementary particle'!
Which isn’t the nation-state, but the culture (Islamic, Xtian, Arab, European, American, Western, Eastern, &c.).
The nation-state is more readily identifiable as a concrete political entity compared to the abstract notion of which culture you belong to.
But nevertheless, the culture may look diverse from the outside, but on the inside is experienced as an coherent continuum.
A wide whole, not a black hole: not the process of translation, transportation, transformation, negotiation, negation, miscegenation, that it is.
Culture now, no more nation-state---got it!
Plus a mental note to myself:
Modernity isn’t a singular project.
Modernity is the plurality of modernities.
Modernity has never been a singular project. Postmodernity is a part of multimodernity---the closure of modernity.
We’re not leaving modernity through postmodernity.
Postmodernity has been part of modernity throughout modernity.
"Modern dash &/or slash postmodern multimodernity" is what "modernity" means.
If I remember correctly it was Margaret Thatcher who said something to the effect of ”reality---it’s such a strong medium, isn’t it?”…the postmodern populist’s credo: what is said & heard IS, what isn’t said & heard isn’t.
You can reduce someone to a pretentious snob of no significance by saying it.
But didn’t Thatcher also say ”society doesn’t exist”?
Fine, let’s go with that rightist shortening & say:
Okay, then you can’t call us pretentious or out of touch---because there’s no social measuring rod if there’s no society.
Your criteria of success ain’t the manufacture-of-consent totem for every single one of us.
F you, populist---beaten at your own game!
Remembrance...forgetting... malignant 'forgetting'...old antisemitism...new antisemitism.
He had survived Auschwitz.
& several other camps.
Now he was 83 & turning senile.
Turning senile doesn’t mean the traumatic memories evaporate.
On the contrary, it means only the traumatic memories stay, while all the others disappear.
So he was reliving the camps over & over.
All the time.
Every single day.
(In Auschwitz he had a friend with a deformed foot.
Which was a death sentence.
So he & his friend trained how the friend could camouflage the limp.
It worked.
They both survived.
He stayed in Poland, while his friend went to Israel.
His friend couldn’t find steady employment there.
The deformed foot.
So he was travelling around, living in different kibbutzim.
Writing letters with no return addresses.
Then the letters stopped.)
He lived in Poland until the late 60s.
Until after the 6-day War.
Which started an anti-Zionist campaign in the Warsaw Pact countries.
He was told to anticipate in anti-Israel demonstrations by the authorities.
He wouldn’t.
So he was stripped of his citizenship.
He ended up in Denmark & became a Danish citizen.
He went on visits to Israel.
(He couldn’t find any leads on his friend.)
He got in contact with a Norwegian organization working on keeping the memory of the Shoah alive.
He travelled to Auschwitz with Norwegian school children, telling about his experiences.
I visited him to do some work in his apartment.
He wanted to drink coffee & talk instead.
So the hour I should have spend on the job, we spend on coffee & talk.
He told me all this.
He also talked about the Kapos.
If they were Germans they were okay.
If they were Polish or Russian they were worse than the SS.
He talked about how war & atrocities will never end.
Until there’s an all-out nuclear war that will destroy everything.
He said all this again & again.
Being senile he couldn’t remember having told it before.
No benign forgetting.
No intended forgetting.
Let’s 'forget', i.e., not care, about Nietzschean juggling with history & remembrance.
Let’s forget, i.e., not care, about the messianic promise in its various versions, religious & secular, dualistic & monistic.
Let’s forget, i.e., not care, about the philosophers' set-up for truth-procedures (sophistry turned on sophistry, anti-sophistics).
Let's forget, i.e., not care about the anti-philosophers' counter-attacks.
A Manifesto of Not-being-a-dumbass of Sorts:
Have an interesting life.
You can call it an authentic life, a creative existence, becoming what we are, Buddha suchness, ecstatic base materialism, riding the tiger, &c., I don’t care because that’s just ideological abstraction.
The relevant stuff is what you do with your everyday life, concretely.
You can use discourse to give you some sense of direction---that’s what it’s here for.
Getting there.
You might find a couple of ideas in avant-garde art, but don’t go for the eschatology.
Capitalism won’t collapse in our lifetime, if ever, so forget about the messianic fix.
You might even find a worthwhile concept or two in political theory on how to organize or whatever.
Obviously you will use this in ways that will contribute to capitalist development, but that’s life.
You’ll have to survive & you’ll do nasty shit to do that.
Don’t worry.
Have some integrity & realize when you have to compromise.
Don’t worship the dead old radicalisms, don’t be sectarian, don’t be an intellectual.
Stop striving to be a star…or be street-level.
We live in an desert, stepping on each other’s toes, & there will be no spontaneous revolt or something hopeful to find in the hopelessness.

NON-ENGAGED (February to March 2008)
We live in an desert, stepping on each other’s toes, & there will be no spontaneous revolt or something hopeful to find in the hopelessness.
So step off of my toes, sister autonomisty, mister middle-classhole (you can hardly be bothered to PretendToBe opposames anymore...not that I blame you).
You're just blocking my view...
---The environmentalism slash eugenics slash ethnoculture slash caste slash localization slash paganism dash hugging nihilist:
In this kind of society you will be offered a lot of generalized ‘work’, but you should only do work that is productive.
Yours truly:
Okay, what sort of work is ‘productive’ then…in ‘this kind of society’?
Is that the post-left’s Abolishment of Work made actually existing by capitalism: unproductive work...& the abundance of life-style choices that makes us stressed out because everything in our lifes---family, friendships, sports, books, clothes, tea or coffee, ecstatic materialism or mystical idealism (something for you?), meat or veggies (some sort of stew?)---is all funked up to be ever so unique…as the branding of the entrepreneurial Project Me?
Signed Question Mark.
In blood.
Like a devil's contract.
The old stunt.
For losers.
To scare the squares.
To scar the scaries.
To mark the marks.
But you're only making them notice you.
The real intent.
Funking up the deal.
But they're good Confucians.
They bang the head of the nail sticking up.
Who's the confusenik here then, refusenik?
If you want to change things find a way to do it secret, silent, sneaking.
Anyone in business has read The Art of War.
The more intellectual ones of that lot know Machiavelli (if nothing else then from Tupac Shakur).
You have read what? maybe a bit of Friedrich N, Vladimir L, Anton P, Toni N, Michel F, Frantz F, Luce I, Hélène C…
&c. [oh, fill out the blanks yourself---blanks like ‘shooting with blanks’…]
Yeah, that’ll teach 'em!
I called them good Confucians & they are---like the (post-)Maoists of China.
You know, the annoying guys the underhand-des-Abendlandes has to compete with in Africa---stripping anywhere south of Sahara for even the last of raw materials.
(Well, we can forget about our white guilt then.)
You know, the rich kids who’ve been bank-rolling the United States’s massive deficit for years & years.
(Well, we can keep up our euro-trashy Schadenfreude then.)
You know, the Fascists LUXUS ZONE WEST is too busy to worry about.
Because YeOlde(Adam)West is too busy worrying about Fascism With a Jihadist Face.
The Westworld ain’t to worried about India or sub-Sahara either.
The fear is the Mashriq & Maghreb, Egypt, & the Arabian Peninsula…Turkey, too close; Pakistan & Indonesia, too far off; Sudan, too African.
Metropolitan Europe only got one conviction---that it’s old & will be run over by a totalitarian, religious, youth.
Such a myth must be developed, nursed, nurtured, massaged, through a long time…Abbé Galiani, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Renan…before it becomes common-place.
Don’t we just wait like the natives for the conquistadors?
But even though we’re ready will they come, or will we collapse internally?
Just getting older & older, a continent of retirees with no one to pay for their retirement.
Not even a take-over to relieve the boredom, fulfil the pessimistic prophecy.
Nope.
Arab-speaking people will visit Muslim theme parks in Spain.
Indians will go to Switzerland (a Bollywood fixation, apparently).
Chinese will play poker & Big Two in Central European casinos.
Scandinavia will be the last stance for the world’s white supremacists, a slightly bigger Nuevo Germania fading away just as surely & silently.
The Godhead has informed me of this in kitsch visions.
The un-reconstructed Judaeo-Christian/Greco-Roman top dog god---a personal god, not quite looking like Santa Claus, but definitely a person, not an abstract principle.
The good devil, the white god.
Not the Renaissance god, not the Reformation god, not the Restorationist god.
Just God.
But not even He will save us now…from the ennui of easy living, from our(’post-identity’)selves.
“Any famous last words on your way out, God?”
“Yeah, democracy only works in rich states with continual economic growth---have a nice life!”
Intimidating guy, make you understand what the Fear of God is about.
Something not even the American-evangelical fundamentalists are really comfortable about, even though they like to pretend to appreciate it.
Make the anti-Xtian ’alternative’ scenes, religious-&/or-political-&/or-cultural, wet themselves: the big Anarcho (&/or Satanic &/or New Right &/or Pagan &/or) Nihilist Underground Society, members only…really spooky.
Sorry, but extremists are just so laughable.
I made a visit to their exclusive club when nobody was there & shoved shrimps into the evil, medieval-looking, hollow metal curtain rods.
Should keep them occupied for a while, searching for the source of the stink.
It only takes a prank---the only worthwhile conceptual art---to make ’em do a meltdown.
The sure sign of imploded identity---rage.
The dictatorial superego at the core of any depression.
But I want to face what life has become in hollowed-out market-economy liberal democratic society.
Facing it without resignation (Stoicism), Nietzschean pessimism of strength, (active or passive) nihilism…just facing it.
Facing it without the little fetish objects we got that allows to enjoy our/selves, enjoy our symptoms, so we’ll be resigned to the harshness of life.
It’s a ongoing process, not a permanent state of perfection.
Not a Clear position you can buy from Tom 666Ruse, but a permanent chaotic scrutiny.
(You thought I was gonna make some hints to Leon T & Julia K, didn’t you?)
& it’s not a slave revolt.
Slave revolts will always be annihilated.
If nothing else then by its own suicidal tendencies.
All that carnevalesque jazz just sucks.
The slave revolt of contemporary civilization is the killing spree, okay?
The anarch, the sovereign individual---you know the Conservative Revolutionary, the Radical Traditionalist, (I)deal ain’t an alternative trajectory to this at all.
It’s just inner exile instead.
Pathos…or apathy.
It’s still narcissism.
Take a look at the Narcissus statue in Louvre…
A.k.a. the "Mazarini Hermaphroditus"---as it comes from the collections of the Cardinal Mazarin, seized during the French revolution---…
A.k.a. the "Genie of Eternal Rest".
The statue is composed of a funeral bust & a lower part, both 3rd century AD; assembled in modern times by an unknown artist.
We don’t need to go all Robert Langdon searching for hermetic info in the Denon wing.
We don’t need a conspiracy theory to explain the world we live in.
We don’t need the intelligentsia.
We need to get the føck outta this mess.
Is capitalism going for yet another suicide attempt?
Consumerism drains the goods made to seduce us, the experience economy’s attempts at fixating our desires, by taking in the glamour & then becoming bored with it all because it’s too easy.
We can jump from one glamour to the next, but not endlessly---the desire fades out.
We become bored & we use the glamours not as something to invest desire in, but just as lust objects.
It’s not love anymore, it’s prostitution.
Without sublimation there’s no society.
Without society there’s no functioning capitalism.
Capital needs a system to work in & human beings need a genuine society to live in to be able to survive capitalism.
& maybe capitalism is the only way for a modern society to function.
Which means we have to somehow save capitalism…---from itself in its current form.
Good luck on that one…
Authority conjures itself away (it’s a trick! it’s a trick!)…& so we don’t have a clear opponent to revolt against.
Then there’s nothing to recuperate for the society.
The good, the bad & the ugly versions of the society.
Then there’s nothing to recuperate for the culture.
The good, the bad & the ugly versions of the culture.
Then there’s nothing to recuperate for the economy.
The good, the bad & the ugly versions of the economy.
& then there’s…no psychic space to establish to protect us from the outside reality.
No psychic space where we can safely represent camera obscura-style all the violent, sexual, nasty stuff from the outside.
So we don’t go total act-out outside.
& no psychic space where we can safely play out all the violent, sexual, nasty stuff.
So we don’t go total act-out outside.
The new sacred is…just nowhere to be found...(?)
Don’t think because capitalism will eat itself that all of a sudden, over night, the society will turn into a socialist system, a caliphate, or whatever.
Consumerism drains sublimation & the sacred like it sucks everything else dry---so they won’t spring back to life after capitalism either.
(Aaaaaargh, no return of the dodo! or your mother's homemade cookies!)
Desublimation & desacralization = sociopathy for everyone.
Goodbye, all things social.
(Aaaaaargh, no love! and no good old---meaningful, communicating---sex!)
Don’t think that means mean human(un)kind finally will be thrown back at itself.
No more history/herstory, no more projects to sublate ourselves in...
We should be so lucky, Emil C---you old softy.
Cut!
Resublimation & resacralization…
Deinstrumentalized enlightenment…
Enlightened modernity…
Radical democracy…
Agonistic pluralism...
Absolutely no messianic promise, no eschatological omega point…
No elitist, vague, crap about critical theory & revolutionary praxis…
No overvaluing or undervaluing art…
No wank about being vanguard---in politics or art---…
Stop X-raying the societal fabric of social antagonism & hegemony---nothing will come of it anysche!§$e…
There’s no talking cure for the system because there’s no social subject to do the talking…
No long march through the institutions…you can’t keep the university or the academy away from the all-encompassing market reality/mythology…
You can’t make autonomous zones or institutions, big-ass or low-key, temporary or permanent…
Neither any ‘invisible riots’ or ‘personal revolts‘---consumerism just loves it…
No anarcho-capitalism or any quick-fix buzz-word new capitalist salvation…
Capitalism can never been funky & we all wanna get rid of it…but that’s just our nihilist &/or apocalyptical desire(-for-desirelessness) talking…our (self-)hatred of the civilization…(consumerism of) the genocidal lust…war of all against all…the suicidal lust…the murder/suicide lustmord transcendence nonsense…of the far left, the far right, the far-out religious fundamentalists…
Note: the neo-liberalists are just Social Darwinist sadists equally nihilistic---cheering the brutal aspects of globalization & consumerism, intentionally misidentifying these as characteristics of capitalism as the splendid blond beast---…
Let’s go ahead & feel better than them---& the everyday mainstream racists, chauvinists, nationalists, classist snobs, gay-bashing philistines, phallus/logos/godhead/identity supremacists…
Because what the hell should we do otherwise to pass the time?