promômo

materials: lisa jeschke david grundy jeremy hardingham lucy beynon david stent patrick farmer george osborne danny hayward mattin staff laura kilbride. magazine & cd. there will be future publications from individual authors, and future magazines.
material-s.blogspot.com

also: 'contingencies' (ed. luke mcmullan / sophie seita): mcmullan, seita, grundy, jeschke, rowan evans. email contingencypress@gmail.com

Spitting Words and Rocks: The London Education Protests, 10.11.10

Oh hello, there was a march through the centre of London yesterday, it went past the House of Parliament and along by the river. It was organised by the NUS and UCU and was protesting education cuts and said things like: “NO to scrapping the EMA / NO to the privatisation of Arts, Humanities and Social Science teaching / NO to cutting ESOL provision / NO to higher fees / NO to fees in FE for ‘adult learning’ / NO to soaring levels of debt / And YES to fairness, equity, and a properly funded state education system.” And this march was supposed to go along its route and then there would be a rally at the end and we would watch some videos and speeches projected on a big screen and then everyone would go home or to the ‘afterparty’ at LSE; and there would be around 15,000 people there, in the middle of the week, in the early afternoon. But then there were 50,000 people from Wales and Scotland and England and some 5,000 of them went to the nearby Millbank Tower and caused damage to private property, which is a mortal sin, and they were not orderly and glass was smashed and there were figures on the roof with an anarchist flag and with fists and they stood out against the blue sky.

So, the media coverage of the demo was predictable, given the way that any of the past few years’ protests and riots in Greece or France have been routinely denounced as dangerous, irresponsible, ‘against common sense’ – the work of thugs, hooligans, ‘yobbos’. In article after article we see the 5,000 protestors who gathered and merged and jostled in the courtyard of 30 Millbank, Conservative Party HQ, similarly denounced as a small ‘extremist’ element (“a minority of idiots” as the NUS president described them). These ‘evil, or at best misguided’ [by whom?!] idiot-thugs (never mind the fact that a number of people there looked delicate and fragile and might be trounced by football hooligans) ‘damage the cause’; these thugs make all reasonable people hate them because they smash a few windows and enter the hallowed sanctum of those who are pushing the low of competition and profit and the law of the market down our throats and telling us to like it and stop choking; because they threw a few eggs and rocks and because there were flares and a small fire was lit with small and delicate wisps of charred paper floating over the crowd and down on them like some sort of confetti; because someone brought out a ghetto-blaster and the crowd started nodding their heads to muffled Drum ‘N Bass and suddenly everything felt like a cross between a rave a riot and a soundtracked piece of film or theatre (a surreal revealing of the real unreality of life under the present system); because the atmosphere was that of a carnival or a party, albeit one driven by frustration and anger – and yet the overall feeling was one of exhilaration – as someone said to me afterwards, ‘I realized when I was standing in that crowd that this was the happiest I’d felt for a long tine’; because this was a piece of fucking street theatre, a performance, an action, a happening; because this was where the avant-garde and performance art met and merged with ‘popular’ culture and the mass euphoria of the crowd in a club or a music festival or a football match or a demo; and where the impulse to destruction stemmed from the same spirit as the impulse to creation and enabled it and fostered it and fuelled it; because this is where theory becomes, became feeling. ‘My education is a fist.’

The point of an action like this is that it cannot be restricted, cannot be shepherded and moved on by the march stewards or the cops, cannot be made to move on rather than sitting down in front of the Houses of Parliament, cannot be reduced to the end-point of a big-screen and speeches made on a bus parked in front of Tate Britain and videos like movie trailers with pounding orchestral music and bogey-man Nick Clegg so that the march becomes the multiplex; all the momentum of whistles and drums and chants and people standing on the roofs of bus-stops and builders on scaffolding being cheered by crowds of students and grinning back could not be made simply to dissipate and disappear, to tail and trail off back down the road into ‘normality’; that we – you – want something more and cannot suppress that longing any longer.

The chants and songs, the rhyming couplets and swearwords and plosive voice explosions that you hear on marches such as this respond to the sloganeering and slick phraseology of advertising/ political-spin-culture, where a catchphrase cons us into acceptance and lulls our thinking minds to sleep; “Ready for Change" comes up against “Tory scum, Here We Come”. We might even say that this is poetry, poetry as antagonism and response and counter-thrust. It may not be ‘good poetry’, the slogans might even ‘embarrass’ you or seem trite and child-like. Yet they are there; this is change we can believe in, or at least it is a glimpse of the change that might happen were the momentum of yesterday afternoon to continue, to build up, to be followed up.

“When we mourn violence done against buildings more than violence done against people, we have totally internalised capitalist rationality. Perhaps attacking buildings is the only way to reassert the importance of being human.”(The Third Estate)

"The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics. There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy." (Emmeline Pankhurst)

“He was in the street, not a professional context but an open framework, a social and public space where all types of different people pass by, and there he was, taking risks without being afraid of looking utterly ridiculous! It reminds me of something that happened during the recent riots in Athens, where journalists came across a gang attacking places that represented neoliberalism to make noise, using breaking glass and burglar alarms as instruments. Improvising in the city. That's so inspiring, like the Futurists, the Scratch Orchestra and Black Block joining forces in an extreme form of sonic dérive! Imagine using police sirens as your instrument! Imagine what a beautiful drone twenty of them would make! The urban space offers so many possibilities for noise production, let's use the city as our venue – we'll always have an audience!”(Mattin)

"Love is not the unswerving bias of police dogs; it has to be made from scratch at the first indication of its possibility.”

“The wall of glass smashed in, looks like what Wordsworth saw; in the flint windbreaker, lying on the empty floor; to be a shard of broken glass, shining like life; psychosis as the mirror of your dreams, or justice.”(Jow Lindsay)

Going Genre-less

[Note - I'm using the term 'genre' here as a means of defining a certain restriction/ unspoken delineation of what is and is not 'permitted' in works of art. I'm not arguing for the radical overhaul/overthrow of genre itself - working within a set of established conventions/ways of making meaning, and then transcending/ modifying them, perhaps to establish another set of meanings (etc) is a means of engaging with historical & cultural imperatives beyond the individual's imperfect tunnel-vision. Nonetheless, as in the essay which sparked these thoughts, I wanted to mount an attack on/ conduct a sceptical consideration of how artists might relate to genre at present - hence, I did not wish to adopt a reverent tone. In any case, what follows is not 'the finished article', but off-the-cuff/ a provocation/ provisional/ a thinking through. I should also note that this piece of writing, for me, is coloured by various things I've been thinking about in relation to musical free improvisation, & to questions of performance/theatre. It might do to bear this in mind, to realize that the piece is primarily concerned with fairly specific areas of contemporary practice, & probably does not apply very well to, say, the nineteenth century novel.]

A: Excerpts from 'Genre's for Fascists' by Sarah Fox - Blogpost at http://www.montevidayo.com

[...]
Norman O. Brown famously concludes Love’s Body: “Everything is metaphor; there is only poetry.

[...]
Poetic does seem a lot more accommodating than prosaic, or dramatic, or fictive, or _______. Poetry is elastic, not even remotely confined to literature. Because just about anything can be poetic: a tree’s shape, the texture of a placenta, quantum physics, justice, monsters, dreams, death. Might we entertain the proposition that poetry transcends genre and/or engulfs it? (Baudrillard: “theory could even be poetry.”) Is there, on the one hand, poetry-as-genre, and on the other a more Orphic, or gnostic, or even primordial poetic function originating in Cro-Magnon’s first metaphoric projections on cave walls—”oceanic feeling,” e.g.—that is, terminologically, a kind of universal principle?

[...]
Does silence have genre? Chance?
Yoko [Ono]’s ecstatic and vertiginous scream?

[...]
Genre is a product and problem of patriarchal economy. Genre = the DNA of the book, its certain paternity, distinction, the disavowal of chaos, “the author.” It’s where the money is (or isn’t). The vessel for both genre and authorship is the book. Which, among other things, is, in a very important sense, a “waste product.” The jouissance and potential “insignificance” for one traveling in the rectal cauldron meet a grave with a trapdoor—just a “little death,” and afterward no toxic trace on the planet (a planet tumored and asphyxiating from all our death drive hyper-reproductivity.) The book—embalmed by genre and the petrified death cries of the forest, metonymous for (reproducing) the person of the author herself—is a burial vault.

So when Joyelle asks us to think about what it really means to go genreless, to essentially speculate about the future of our enterprise, I find myself pondering questions like these: If forced to describe “what you write” without naming genre or any terminology related to the notion of genre, how would you do it? Is genre democratic? Manipulative? Are the constraints of genre part of your process? Are you addicted to genre? In what ways is your identity, your image, significant to the readers of your work? How come nobody but us gives a shit about our genre? Is permanence, and/or “legacy,” crucial to your creative investments? Do you know who you are without genre? Can there be books, or even authors, in a genreless culture?

Paradigm is our enemy. Everything is malleable. There’s only poetry."

B – Genre Violence

Spurred by the piece from which i've quoted at length above, i've been wondering how far the consideration of genre is the condition of possibility for much 'critical' thought about art – does placing artists within a community (real or constructed, canon-formation style, by critics, after the fact) becomes placing them in pigeon-holes, in boxes? The title i’ve chosen is maybe a stupid flippant pun – but in a real sense i think genre does do violence to the work of art, bending/ twisting/ distorting/ modifying it to fit some pre-conceived pattern, shaving off the edges so it will fit neatly & nicely within the designated area in which it is allowed to exist…

Yes it *is* important to consider *community* & the social context of the art in question- where how why it was produced - but doing this thru the trope of genre ends up being always so fucking taxonomic - the 'post-punk shoegaze free-bop avant-nu-metal-speed-thrash-core of the artist's style'... - the work never considered except in constant rel(eg)ation to what has gone before & is judged as the starting point, the eternal point of comparison, the gold standard. We're constantly referred back to a few cultural 'signposts', 'great works', 'top albums' fixed in aspic, often ignoring where they came from (see rock & roll and the white commodification of black music) or that they occurred in the flux and flow and warp and wave of a *continuing* culture (continuing, not necessarily via a process of 'development', but nonetheless thru reciprocal hauntings sharings borrowings etc)). These 'great works' are then judged as the 'starting point' for all future consideration (sometimes the critic tries to predict that the album (or book, or painting, or whatever) will become established as a future 'great work' - actively trying to 'assist' in the process of canon formation). Such reliance on/obsession with 'great works' takes place, it seems to me, mainly because critics cannot be bothered to actually talk about the work itself and its particular aesthetic/sensuous/intellectual qualities - cannot allow the pleasure it might give them (or cannot separate that from the spectacle/economic machine that attempts to shape and subsume it) – must always filter it through canons and genres and critical categories. (Not that 'art' should not be *critical* in a very real sense - but ‘critical’ as connoting a kind of active engagement and passionate concern with the world and the circumstances in which 'we' find ourselves & how we change them and work with and in them and (work our way) out of them - *not* ‘critical’ as connoting the formation of taxonomic categorical cross-referencing genre canons (which always purposely exclude the 'undesirable'/unsayable/unwanted/threatening - or include them only to neutralize them, mute them, strip them of their screaming core))…

This all conditions what is ‘allowed’ or not - what is permissible - 'extreme' things/actions/ways of being are in the end restrained because they too are placed within certain generic contexts - e.g. 'performance art', 'noise music', 'electro-acoustic free improvisation'. & the same with the constant live documentation of every gig/ performance/ reading/ happening on youtube or bootleg mp3s circulating the internet - everything is processed and squeezed through the electronic wires/ circuits/ thru the machine (which replaces/stands in for/merges with the body?). There is no single, important, *present* live act(ion) - everything is connected/ globalised/ simultaneous/ disposable.

& even in live action, when we are in the room performing or watching others (usually men, displaying all the macho qualities of 'radical' political sympathies/imagery (poster boys Che Guevara, Peter Brotzmann, Jesus Christ with their beards / Malcolm X with his machine gun ('By Any Means Necessary')/ Archie Shepp with his saxophone) - even then, even when we convince ourselves that this is the necessary 'underground', the 'resistance', the space which might allow some glimpse of utopia (tho' probably we don't think that slinking down the stairs to buy another pint of beer at the bar), we are held in check. But just what are we afraid of? Of offending people? Offending social norms? But does anyone every really think why those norms are in place to begin with anyway? Is there some sense of guilt in making art? That it must be done 'the right way', the established way (with reference to some previous canonical hero/ martyr), otherwise we're not taking it seriously? Is anyone really worried about failure? Doesn't failure provide the conditions of possibility for new forms, glimpses of possibilities/ utopias/ visions flecked thru dreams ravings starkness? Which only exist as the tiniest flashes in our own body circuits? Which exist only because they cannot be constrained / because they spurt out almost accidentally, tho' willed / like breath or howling

What then is (in) this flash, this glimpse, these flashes & glimpses - what is *not* genre? What is not marketed/marketable - what is itself only itself in that moment nothing else other than itself there present at that one place at that one time in that one room or one place with that one person or that particular combination of persons occupying that space - what is *singular*, irreducible - singular in being itself & no other (& not pretending (simu/lation, di/lution)), yet *plural* too in its sharing/ confrontation/ occupation of multiple possibilities/ impossibilities. I guess this is a way of asking, or answering the question sarah fox poses: “Do you know how you are without your genre?” Do you know how (who/why) you are – without that protection, stripping it away. Which is also the point mattin makes in his essay, ‘going fragile’:

“This is an unreliable moment, to which no stable definition can be applied. It is subject to all the particularities brought to this moment. The more sensitive you are to them, the more you can work with (or against) them. You are breaking away from previous restrictions that you have become attached to, creating a unique social space, a space that cannot be transported elsewhere. Now you are building different forms of collaboration, scrapping previous modes of generating relations.”

In other words...this is the moment/ before we find out / the remit and discover / what's possible

AAAARG!!!! (DOT ORG)

It seems that A.AAAARG.ORG has finally bitten the dust: the site’s main page now bears the legend, ‘A.AAAARG.ORG DOES NOT EXIST’, a delightful comment on the transient and virtual nature of an ‘organisation’ that was always virtual, never ‘actual’, but which offers us some intriguing glimpses, even, one might say, utopian possibilities, for the future of study and intellectual exchange. Given this, I thought that now might be an appropriate to set out some of my thoughts on the AAAARG phenomenon (yes, something can be a ‘phenomenon’ even if it isn’t all over myspace, Facebook, Twitter, the Guardian, and the Huffington Post) and what it might mean.

Some time last summer, at the internet point in a small Spanish albergue on the Camino de Santiago, I came across a link to a resource with an astounding amount of book-length, PDF-format academic material, from the likes of Derrida, Barthes, Adorno, Deleuze and Zizek, apparently available for free download. I'd just graduated from university, and had thus lost my access to university library facilities and to websites, such as JSTOR, which contain back-issues of journals and academic e-books. Furthermore, my graduation had necessitated a move from Cambridge back to Swindon, where the availability of academic books (particularly in the realms of literary and critical theory, aesthetics, and 'avant-garde' music) leaves something to be desired. Thus, though I didn’t realize it fully until I got back home from Spain, AAAARG.ORG (later updated to A.AAAARG.ORG.), was to become a particularly useful resource. Having subscribed to the website’s mailing list, I found a daily e-mail popping into my inbox, containing a list of at least twenty uploaded books per day, on topics as diverse as anarchist and Marxist thought, aesthetics, literary theory, continental philosophy, geography, feminism, poetry, orientalism: you name it, it was there. My hard drive was soon filling up with neatly-compressed PDFs of all kinds, most of which I still have not read.

The problem with this sort of thing is that such this vast availability of information, easily clickable and downloadable, means that a lifetime of thought becomes translated into a few megabytes of hard disk space. I’m not saying that such information should become the privilege of an elite, moneyed few – those with the inclination and the cash to splash out fifteen pounds on a two-hundred page slab of Derridean wisdom – but the worry is that it becomes just another bit of data, just another part of the spectacle, just another collection of dots on a screen to which we pay only the vaguest attention. It’s the same with music downloads: there’s no doubt that fans of ‘left-field’ music (particularly those who missed out on original releases the first time round, because they hadn’t yet been born!) have received something akin to an education through file-sharing blogs like Inconstant Sol, Church Number Nine, and all the others (see my article in the second issue of ‘eartrip’). We owe much to this massive up-surge in the availability of MP3 versions of long out-of-print LPs containing free jazz, free improvisation, musique concrete, Indian classical music, Afrobeat, and all other kinds of cross- and sub-generic offerings. And yet, I find myself – and I know I’m not alone in this – with piles of CDs, each containing about twenty hours’ worth of music – CDs of material I’ve downloaded and burned myself, CDs I’ve been given by friends – that, in all likelihood, I may not listen to for months or even years; and, if I do listen to them, I may not listen to them with the full and careful attention they deserve, and which might be accorded to them if they sat in front of me as separate and unique objects, gate-fold LPs or jewel-case CDs, rather than megabytes on a computer screen. The tendency is to see something that looks interesting, and to download, because it’s free – and then to forget about it, to put it on the back-burner, to download something else, and then something else, and something else again…

There’s a further problem with the academic book file-sharing: most of these books are still in print, unlike the LPs. In the end, though, I don’t find this too hard a claim to react to: few of us have the money to splash out on these books; most of us rely on borrowing other people’s copies, using university libraries, and the like. And I’m intrigued and encouraged by the anti-copyright rhetoric of free improviser/theorist Mattin and others, and by the idea of some new kind of digital university, a virtual space where the exchange of ideas is free and open, where information is shared for its own sake, rather than traded and bartered for and guarded with the jealousness with which ‘property’ is guarded – a radical system, anarchy in the best sense, with exciting political implications. Even if such a system doesn’t exist in the ‘real world’, sites like A.AAAARG, just like musical free improvisations, offer a glimpse of what such utopias might be like, provide templates which might be applied to the worlds of politics and social organization on a much larger scale. This becomes all the more pertinent as I’ve become increasingly jaded by the monetization and corruption inherent in the structures of universities as they exist, in the main, today; by the way that people with ‘good intentions’ and exciting minds are forced into systems in which they are forced to fight for their right to think, provoke, challenge, inquire, forced to tick boxes and assess the financial and economic benefits their work will bring. The ‘virtual university’ offers an alternative where money and physical space is not an issue, a truly global collaborative network, where ideas are shared for their own importance, and not for their financial benefit.

Having said all this, I’m afraid I will have to deflate this rousing conclusion by admitting that it is far easier on the eyes to read a book made of paper and ink, rather than one made of pixels and brightly-glowing lights. Anyway, further reading at the following links:

Paris Ionescu on aaaarg and agonism (http://blog.selfportrait.net/2010/05/29/some-thoughts-on-aaaarg-and-agonism/)

Newsflash on the aaaarg closure (http://mitochondrialvertigo.wordpress.com/2010/04/24/macmillan-and-mark-taylor-take-down-aaaarg-org/)

Discussion with AAAARG architect Sean Dockray (http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2010/01/05/small-is-beautiful-a-discussion-with-aaaarg-architect-sean-dockray/) "I don’t think it’s sustainable, but file sharing is resilient. That part is sustainable if what’s meant is something that will weather bad economies, legal threats, changes in technology, etc. AAAARG probably won’t. But I don’t think it matters; it’s not trying to be the new library. That said, I don’t think it will disappear, I don’t think anything ever does. The word promiscuity for the digital object I think is a really good one."

Very comprehensive overview/history of online text-sharing sites (http://openreflections.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/scanners-collectors-and-aggregators-on-the-%E2%80%98underground-movement%E2%80%99-of-pirated-theory-text-sharing/). “As mentioned before, the harm to producers (scholars) and their publishers (in Humanities and Social Sciences mainly Not-For-Profit University Presses) is less clear. First of all, their main customers are libraries (compare this to the software business model: free for the consumer, companies pay), who are still buying the legal content and mostly follow the policy of buying either print or both print and ebook, so there are no lost sales there for the publishers. Next to that it is not certain that the piracy is harming sales. Unlike in literary publishing, the authors (academics) are already paid and do not loose money (very little maybe in royalties) from the online availability.. [….] Still, it is not only the lack of fear of possible retaliations that is feeding the upsurge of text sharing communities. There is a strong ideological commitment to the inherent good of these developments, and a moral and political strive towards institutional and societal change when it comes to knowledge production and dissemination.”

Brief article on piracy (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/nov/24/file-sharing-free-piracy) "It is not only because there can be potentially infinite owners of property that the internet redefines our notion of it. It is also that people who participate in the exchange of immaterial works do not treat them as property. When they exchange music, books or movies, they are not merely transferring ownership from themselves to others; they simply do not recognise themselves as owners in the first place."

Mattin’s essay on Free Improvisation and the Anti-Copyright ethos (http://www.mattin.org/essays/Mattin-ANTI-COPYRIGHT.html) "Notions of intellectual property are going to be the issue of the future, and if we do not find ways of challenging the structures that are being developed we are going to be pretty fucked."

aaaarg itself (http://a.aaaarg.org/)