Mismo Sol Para Todas
Towards the development of a revolutionary praxis of everyday life.
Preface:
Initially the point of departure for my work has been an explicitly “political” standpoint. I have often dealt with political issues and my practise has been an attempt at intervention in this arena.
Theoretically too, I have drawn as much from political sources as artistic ones. Most productively from attempts to combine the two such as the Situationists.
My own aim has been to develop a praxis that reunifies art and politics with the totality of my creative activity into what Raoul Vaniegem termed the “revolution of everyday life”.
Of course this attempt at praxis has produced what Marxists would perhaps call a dialectic. To paraphrase a poorly remembered line from a movie; It´s hard to stay angry when there is so much beauty in the world.
What could be termed the “revolutionary ecologism” of my work necessarily entails the development of a celebration of the beauty of wild nature, as much as a condemnation of the suicidal tendencies of industrial capitalism that are destroying it.
Introduction:
This work is an attempt to recognise the development of my own praxis from that of a separate art practise and political activism, towards a way of living that contains not only both of these but a holistic approach that informs the totality of my actions.
In order to do this it is necessary to situate my actions within the historical, political and cultural contexts within which I work. Obviously it is beyond the scope of this work to provide an in depth study of these subjects. Many works have been written on these matters, my bibliography conatins many of those which have informed my own theoretical development. The emphasis is placed upon the weaknesses of these as strategies for the application of revolutionary desires. Much of my standpoint is informed by the Situationist critique of capitalism and their ‘modest proposal’ for its replacement with a revolution of everyday life.
It should also be noted that this is not an objective or neutral study. My intention is to provide the reader with a survey of my own interpretations of ideas, experiences and events; and the positions that this has led me to take. Primarily I am concerned with the practical application of these decisions, and am of the belief that theory and practise cannot, nor should not, be separated.
As Lenin was fond of quoting from Goethe: “Theory is grey, but life is green.”
1:¿Que Hora Son Me Corazon?
“We aren’t the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy…”
(F.C. aka The Unabomber)[1][1]
Modern life is, as they say, rubbish. Our society seems to exist on a level of low intensity warfare. Endemic crime and violence, pollution, ecological catastrophe, terrorist outrages etc. provide us with constant reminders of how bad things can get. Yet even the normal, the everyday, the very rhythm of our daily lives are rotten to the core with misery and deprivation.
“What spark of humanity, of possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machines, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where crowd communes in brutish weariness?”[2][2]
Even here in the West, despite being the most economically privileged societies on the planet, our lives are very often miserable. Suicide is one of the major killers in our society. A huge proportion of the population of this country is on prescribed anti-depressants. Whilst we are led to believe with have the means to provide for all of our needs, material poverty – whilst nothing compared to that in the trikont[3][3] – is still shockingly evident on even a cursory trip through areas like Salford or the South Wales valleys.
Such poverty is not a new or a shocking thing. It is, and always has been an integral part of the economic system which have had since the industrial revolution. Capitalism necessarily produces inequality. Such inequality is based upon the drive for surplus value and profit that provide the motor for the economy.
Nor is an awareness or critique of this economic system a new thing. Right from its inception capitalism has had its opponents; in practise, such as the Luddites who physically resisted the imposition of industrialism and the later development of the labour movement in all its tendencies, and in theory with birth of the various socialist critiques of capitalism. Karl Marx provided one of the earliest rigorous critiques, and his analysis continues to provide the basis for most critics to this day.
“Let us take an example. For one shilling a laborer works all day long in the fields of a farmer, to whom he thus secures a return of two shillings. The farmer not only receives the replaced value which he has given to the day laborer, he has doubled it. Therefore, he has consumed the one shilling that he gave to the day laborer in a fruitful, productive manner. For the one shilling he has bought the labor-power of the day-laborer, which creates products of the soil of twice the value, and out of one shilling makes two. The day-laborer, on the contrary, receives in the place of his productive force, whose results he has just surrendered to the farmer, one shilling, which he exchanges for means of subsistence, which he consumes more or less quickly. The one shilling has therefore been consumed in a double manner — reproductively for the capitalist, for it has been exchanged for labor-power, which brought forth two shillings; unproductively for the worker, for it has been exchanged for means of subsistence which are lost for ever, and whose value he can obtain again only by repeating the same exchange with the farmer. Capital therefore presupposes wage-labor; wage-labor presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence.”[4][4]
Of course Capitalism means more than simple exploitation and poverty. One of the strengths of Marx’s critique was the analysis of the alienation caused by wage labour. The implications of such alienation are far wider than simple hunger. It shapes the material conditions within which we live, but it also shapes the social, cultural and psychological frames of daily life.
“As soon as man accepts money as equivalent to life, the sale of living activity becomes a condition for their physical and social survival. Life is exchanged for survival. Creation and production come to mean sold activity. A man’s activity is ‘productive’, useful to society, only when it is sold activity. And the man himself is a productive member of society only if the activities of his daily life are sold activities. As soon as people accept the terms of this exchange, daily life takes the form of universal prostitution.”[5][5]
Marx’s analysis also contained another crucial point; that Capitalism also creates not only the conditions that make its abolition necessary and desirable, but also the agent that has both the motive and the means to abolish it.
“Capital can multiply itself only by exchanging itself for labor-power, by calling wage-labor into life. The labor-power of the wage-laborer can exchange itself for capital only by increasing capital, by strengthening that very power whose slave it is. Increase of capital, therefore, is increase of the proletariat, i.e., of the working class.”[6][6]
It seems clear that this state of affairs is not healthy, either socially or for us as individuals. Yet it continues only so as we participate. Particularly as it is a Marxist banalism that Capital necessarily produces the potential for its own overthrow.
Of course we cannot ignore the physical need for survival[7][7]. But the surrender of our lives in return is surely too high a price to pay.
The absence of life is covered up by its replacement with what the Situationists called the spectacle.
“The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production. It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification, since it occupies the main part of the time lived outside of modern production”[8][8]
We are taught to gain satisfaction from “a job well done”, even to enjoy our waged labor. The spectacle provides us with the delights of conspicuous consumption in all its forms. Yet this all still depends upon our participation. Even if we are aware of all these things we still “choose the matrix”.
“Only recently has it become possible to see the similarities among the various ways in which nature, the proletariat, and life itself are exploited – forms of exploitation that are the driving force behind survival. The exploiters and the exploited are like two arrows aimed at the same mark: the absent life.”[9][9]
The trick of the spectacle, and indeed of all alienated, hierarchical systems throughout history, has been to fill the vacuum left by the absence of free, authentic living.
The aspirational workers hope that one day they will achieve the career status and financial security to live the life they have spent their life[10][10] striving for.
The same psychology suckers those whose urge appears to be outside or against the standard capitalist dreams.
The artist hopes that one day their talent will be recognised, that their work will be appreciated (be it prestigious shows, commercial success or avant-garde chic).
The revolutionary hopes that one day, the “glorious day” all of their heroic efforts and sacrifice will succeed.
They (we?) do more than hope. They believe. To succeed they need faith. Despite claims of scientific materialism for the “enlightened” history has become heaven in the robes of reason. As Vaniegem rightly states:
“One need not get very close to these ideas to detect a whiff of the cassock”[11][11]
Unlike the religious fundamentalist who uses suicide as shortcut to paradise, this faith is invested in deferred gratification, a luxurious alienation that until recently was only available to the most privileged. In modern capitalist society such faith in the future (and conversely, yet complementarily, fear of the future) is the very motor of the economy.[12][12]
The change in modern society is that gratification has been deferred to from one side of the deathbed to the other.
“Christian mythology proposed to exorcise the old curse inherent in the lucrative production of inhumanity…it offered a pact to the oppressed: posthumous equality in exchange for submission to the spiritual and temporal powers (“render unto Caesar” is one example). Better yet, as a special incentive, it offered prime consideration for entry into the kingdom of God for those who had learned to find real love for their enslavement and contempt for all forms of pleasure.”[13][13]
It is easy to see this reproduced in the grey suits and A1 flip charts of the working world. Yet it is also easy to discern amongst the joyless struggle and sacrifice of the political activist or in the endless “graft” of the artist who accepts necessity of compromise in a compromise to necessity.
Such a “protestant work ethic” creates the vacuum that enables the spectacle to replace life.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses are wrong when they claim, “there are millions now living that will never die”.
The sad truth is that there are millions now dying that will never live,
“The very first symptom of alienated life is the very gradual appearance of time. The first reification and increasingly the quintessential one, time is virtually synonymous with alienation.”[14][14]
Linear time presents us with a forced route march towards our own mortality, yet despite this obvious destination the objectification of time has meant that we treat what is perhaps the most finite of all commodities with the same wasteful alienation as all the other aspects of lives that we have turned into products.
Just as we lay waste to the rainforests and wreak havoc with the ecosystem into feed components into industry, we carelessly treat time, our lives reduced into the language of business, as just another part of the equation in capital’s logic of exchange. Time and money are fitted into this exchange as somehow equivalent.
Yet even within this accepted logic of capitalist economics this makes little sense. We treat money and capital with far more care than time. It is considered good sense, even wise, to “invest” the 40 plus years of our working lives for the promise of maybe 10 or so years of retirement. To simplify this transaction; we end not in profit, but with a return of only 25% of the initial investment.[15][15] If this were any other commodity than time this kind of exchange would never even be contemplated.
“If it seems somewhat ridiculous to talk of revolution, this is obviously because the organised revolutionary movement has long since disappeared from the modern countries where the possibilities of a decisive transformation of society are concentrated. But everything else is even more ridiculous, since it implies accepting the existing order in one way or another.”[16][16]
This statement is perhaps even truer today than it was when it was written 40 years ago. Currently on a spectacular level we have witnessed a resurgence of revolutionary political activism in the recent manifestations of the “anti-capitalist” movement(s). The demonstrations and street fighting in western cities such as London, Seattle, Prague, Gothenburg and Genoa have brought revolutionary demands and practise back to our attention.
During the emergence of the labour movement in the 19th century an early manifestation of the concept of the General Strike was William Benbow’s idea of the “Grand National Holiday”. The greatest threats to the dominance of capital have often come in the guise of pleasure or the “festival of the oppressed”. The Paris Commune is a classic example of this (as indeed were the events in Paris during 1968). In more recent times groups such as Reclaim The Streets have also worked along these lines.
My own praxis developed along these lines, inspired by this tradition and informed by my own experiences as an activist within its contemporary manifestations. My work often contained an explicit protest at aspects of capitalism and attempted to engage with the struggle against it. A good example of this work would be a piece I did whilst studying at the Universidade do Porto.
On the 26th April 2001, wearing a dust mask, I walked along a road in the centre of Porto placing single red carnations in the exhaust pipes of cars (See figures 1 and 2).
This was entirely contextually specific. The 25th April was the 27th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution.
This revolution is known as the “revolution of the carnations” because a woman gave people red carnations (cravas in Portuguese) which people then gave to the soldiers and placed in the barrels of their guns.
The iconography I appropriated for this work was therefore explicit.
Equally obvious, particularly with the use of the dust mask is the issue of pollution and environmentally damaging emissions from cars.
The effects of global warming are currently very topical in Portugal. This winter flooding in the North of the country has been some of the worst on record. This is widely blamed on global warming.
Although I don´t know the figures for Portugal, they are likely to be comparable to those in the UK which show that roughly 30 000 people die every year as a result of the pollution caused by cars (This figure excludes those killed in car accidents, a mortality rate 500% higher in Portugal than in England. Nor does it include all those killed as a consequence of the auto and petrol industries).
When you compare this figure with the estimate of around 1000 people killed during the entire Salazar regime it becomes clear (without wishing to minimise the evils of fascism) that the revolution is as yet unfinished.
Whilst in many ways I found this work to be successful (certainly the public point I was trying to make was understood by the passers by who formed the work’s audience) it is clear that such actions are subject to the same weaknesses as most explicitly political actions; the danger of simply filling the role of the specialist political militant.
The tendency of the spectacle to recuperate (as described by the Situationists back in the Sixties) remains formidable….
The anti – capitalist manifestations mentioned above have their roots in the emergence of groups such as Earth First![17][17] and Reclaim the Streets. Whilst these groups initially appeared to limit themselves to contesting the ecological impact of capitalism, the influence of groups such as the Situationists[18][18] was clear in the nature of their actions. Sculptures became barricades, barricades became sculptures. Direct action became indistinguishable from performance art – typified by the arrest of a pantomime horse at the Newbury bypass protests. Parties and festivals were (and still are) an integral part of political activity. The street party was developed into both an art form and a method of bringing the flow of the city to a standstill (also fulfilling the anarchist tradition of propaganda by the dead by proving a highly effective means of temporarily recreating public space). Of course none of this was especially new. The traditions that these protests echoed were usually referred to in the propaganda produced by these groups.[19][19]
However, right from the start these groups reproduced the old dangers of specialisation and alienation. There was always a tendency for the movement to regard itself as the cavalry riding to the rescue of the environment/community. The recuperated media caricature of the “eco-warrior” not only had an element of truth in it, but was seized upon, even celebrated, by many within the movement who uncritically revelled in this spectacular role. The dangers of this behaviour were obvious; critiques appeared within the movement’s press of the “ego-warrior” (as their critics aptly called them). However the damage was done. Activists (and crucially “non – activist” local people) were often alienated by the perceived elitism of the “professional protesters”. Such terminology alone should highlight the degeneration of the movement into role of the “Militant” that Vaniegem had critiqued in “The Revolution of Everyday life”.
As soon as specialised roles were accepted, the work ethic and hierarchy followed. The otherwise inspirational occupation (and transformation) of Claremont Road in London[20][20] was dogged by a quarrels over “whether people were working hard enough at barricading”. The alienation of the workplace was reproduced amongst its opponents, and alienation cannot be fought with alienated means.
At the same time the response of the State was increasingly violent and repressive. The introduction of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act criminalised many previously legal methods of protest. This has been followed up with increased Anti-Terrorist legislation. Street Parties could no longer happen without the inevitable “riot” at the end. The street parties themselves became “anti-capitalist” protests and provided the media with easily recuperable images of “violent anarchists”, whilst the creativity and playfulness were gradually replaced by martial organisation, martyrdom and paranoia. It all became very predictable and sterile.
3:Mentira
“It’s a fucking poor excuse for life, innit eh?! Art-schmart, God-schmod, Jesus-schmeesus…I have proved it to myself that art is about life and the art world is about money, and I’m the only one who fucking knows that…”
(Damien Hirst)
A couple of years ago some art students in Leeds managed to get a grant of several hundred pounds towards their final project and promptly disappeared to sunny Spain.
Their exhibition consisted of postcards and holiday snaps that they sent back to England. Naturally tabloid outrage followed.
In due course the students returned and admitted the whole thing had been a hoax, a clever provocation. The postcards were sent by a friend in Spain, the holiday snaps had been shot on Blackpool beach and the money was returned, having been safely stored in the building society. Sighs of relief were breathed all round and the students were duly awarded a first for their efforts.
Whatever the merits of the work, the reaction it attracted is instructive. It appears pretending to present “holiday” as art is acceptable, but really doing it….
No doubt a part of this reaction was caused by the offence it caused to the “protestant work ethic”; the students had somehow cheated, they hadn’t earned their right to enjoy themselves. They seemed to suggest that you could live life without making the required sacrifice beforehand. The exchange mechanism that provides the basis for modern civilisation was challenged (however fleetingly). What if everyone did this?
“A large part of the Situationist critique of art consists in showing to what extent contemporary artists, by abandoning the richness of supersession implicitly present albeit not fully realised in the 1910 – 1925 period have condemned themselves to doing art as one does business.”[21][21]
There have, of course, been some fine examples of contemporary artists attempting to challenge the commodification dominating modern cultural practise in this country. One of the best known examples is Michael Landy’s piece “Breakdown”, where the artist systematically destroyed all his posessions. Some of the potency of this work was, however, lost (inevitably) by the visable existance of the safety net of his fashionable connections with the so-called “Brit Art” scene and the patronage of wealthy art dealers[22][22].
More powerfully the K Foundation (Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond) burnt a million pounds. The symbolism of the amount is unquestionable, representing the ultimate material goal of our society (as demonstrated by the risable TV show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”). The effectiveness of their action can perhaps be shown by the fact they were roundly attacked by all their potential audiences. The art world, music scene and political activists alike condemned the sacrilage and waste of their behaviour. In some ways they provided a gesture too extreme for capitalism to recuperate through any of its specatacular roles. Ultimately, however, it remains pure, but purely destructive:
“Nihilists! One more step if you want to be revolutionaries.”[23][23]
To have any real revolutionary potential such rejectionist acts need contain the possibility of a generalised adoption of both the refusal of the logic of capital and its replacement with something else. Most of us do not have access to enough commodities or wealth to make its destruction noticable.
“Nobody seems worried that joy has been absent from European music for nearly two centuries; which says everything. Consume, consume: We take ashes for fire.”[24][24]
The Situationist concept of recuperation applies to artistic activity as much as political activity. The mistake that movements such as dada made was to remain within the framework of the discourse of “art” (with the partial exception of some of the German dadaists perhaps?). To be “anti-art” is to still allow oneself to be defined in reference to a separated, specialised, role. Ironically the Situationists themselves have fallen prey to recuperation, although the “art world” dismissed them as “political” and the political dismissed them as “artists”; the box marked “Cultural Studies” happily accomodated them alongside the expression of recuperated Situationist themes by postmodernists such as Baudrillard.
The Situationist challenge to the artist remains crucial however:
“…the old specialisation of art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.
…there is no longer any such thing as a work of art in the classical sense of the word. Nor can there be such a thing. So much the better. Poetry is to be found elsewhere.”[25][25]
This struggle to ‘realise and supress’ (as the Situationists would put it) art continues today:
“Art for All, or None at All!”[26][26]
The Situationists realised that as long as “radical gestures” and practise remained confined within the role of “art” then even the most revolutionary art can be incorporated into the spectacle. Duchamp’s “Fountain” provides perhaps the most well known example of this.
The critique of roles, of course, applies equally to all specialised and separated roles that the spectacle encourages us to fill. The advertising of products as lifestyle is a widely critiqued way in which this tendency is reinforced.
The Situationist International itself fell foul of the assumption of specialised roles. The organisation split into two rival factions. An “artistic” faction largely based in Scandinavia around Asger Jorn and the “political” faction centred on Debord, Vaniegem and Michelle Bernstein. This itself is an echo of the unresolved dichotomy between the roles of artist and political activist that plagued the surrealists, producing at one extreme Dali and at the the other Aragon.
4:Por El Suelo Camino Me Pueblo
“In a very general way we know what we want. We want to live as wild free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up with this misery? We want to make this world into a place where our desires can be immediately realised, not just sporadically, but normally.We want to live not in a dead world of resources, but in a living world free wild lovers.”[27][27]
Such a program cannot help but fuel the creative urge that drives the “artist”, it is also fundamentally political. It goes goes completely aganst the grain of the productive ethic of capitalism.
At the same time its core of what Vaniegem termed “radical subjectivity” guards against its recuperation into the specatacle. Transcending the roles that play a part in the reproduction of capital by refusing to allow itself to be restricted by them.
These same roles can also be détourned. The role of the artist is one of the few in modern society that indulges the desire for experimentation combined with free play. By refusing the the lure of commodification it is perhaps possible to turn capital’s weapons against itself. The Leeds students mentioned above could have really gone to beach…and they probably would’ve gotten away with it too.
Genuinely liberatorary projects may perhaps, therefore, be possible in the “guise” of art.[28][28] Certainly many of the best artists and projects contain a challenge to, or refusal of, spectular, mediated society.
“We should collectively define our program and realise it in a disciplined manner, by all means, even artistic ones.
Our central idea is that of the construction of situations, that to say the concrete construction of momentary ambiences of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality”[29][29]
The construction of situations was/is a mechanism to subvert and breakdown the specatacle.
“The society that moulds all of its surroundings has developed a special technique for shaping its very territory, the solid ground of this collection of tasks. Urbanism is capitalism’s seizure of the natural and human environment; developing logically into absolute domination, capitalism can and must now remake the totality of space into its own setting.”[30][30]
In much of the world the Spectacle has redesigned our physical and visual environment.
This equally applies to what we term the countryside, much of this is as an integral a part of the industrial hydra as the city. A trip into the British countryside will reveal factory farmed monocultures and the consequent rampant sicknesses. A visit to the forests of British Colombia confronts us with the brutal symmetry of timber clearcuts.
It is not just the commodification of the world that the Capital demands. It is the visual and psychological annexation of the wild into the into the logic of the spectacle.
The Disneyfication of the wilderness plays a major part in creating the socio-cultural conditions necessary for such expropriation.
“The term Environment lends itself perfectly to telling lies and giving illusions. The people who run production and distribution, the controllers of media, and Government, local and national, are systematically using the term Environment to hide realities, confuse the public, and distort their perception of reality. This is being done for the basest of motives: to maintain profits and power. The term Nature is dropped, and replaced by Environment.”[31][31]
This tendency can be seen manifested in way the wilderness has been culturally repackaged as a ‘leisure activity’. A chunk of ‘free time’ that can be commodified and sold to us. Naturally the Americans have produced this in the form most suitable for mass consumption[32][32]. The Grand Canyon (connected by a short leisure flight from Las Vegas) has gift shops, guest lodges, suggested viewing points etc. Most of the park’s visitors only have time to peer over the edge (behind safety rails of course) and buy a souvenir T-Shirt before their tour bus whisks them off on to the next ‘natural wonder’. Indeed the airconditioned Imax Cinema in ‘Grand Canyon Village’ (inbetween the airport and the pizza restaurant) eliminates the need to actually see the canyon at all.
Yet even here the reign of the spectacle is vulnerable. No matter how packaged it is the wilderness still kills unwary humans. The America National Parks and Recreation Areas notice boards are full of reports of the deaths of careless tourists. To take the Grand Canyon again as an example, the temperature inside the canyon whilst I was hiking there was 126°F. Without copious supplies of water and careful preparation (I started hiking before sunrise to avoid the the highest heat) you would be dead within hours. Tourists attempting to venture into the canyon with sneakers and a can of Coke have to be prevented from such potential suicide by the park rangers. Even the hills of North Wales aren’t always the playgrounds we treat them as[33][33].
Even in the heart of the city weeds still break through the smothering tarmac carpet.
We can help to widen these cracks.
Sometimes we can do this literally. During the Reclaim the Streets action on the M10 motorway in London in 1996 stiltwalking pantomime dames concealed pneumatic drills under the skirts which, in time with the rythym of the dancing crowds and beats of the sound system, dug holes in the road into which trees were planted.
It is equally revolutionary simply to try and rebuild our relationship with unmediated nature. The specatcle’s origins lie in the mediation of experience.
The desire to try and break down or through this mediation has informed current developments within my own practise.
Recently I have consciously started to build small piles of stones in selected places.
It is, however, something I have done since a small child. It is an action common to many cultures. In the deserts of the South West USA they are used to mark trails.
For me it is an act of recognition of the beauty of a place, an offering of reverence to nature. A minor intervention on my part using already present materials in an acknowledgment of its intrinsic beauty.
Like Fernando Lanhas´ Pedras Pinturas[34][34] or Julia Ventura´s Untitled Landscapes[35][35] this work highlights the beauty of nature whilst minimising the role of human authorship. For me, my role is perhaps most importantly simple presence and recognition.
My function as an artist is only a minor rearrangement of components that are already there. Nothing is added to, or removed from the elements that nature herself has already provided.
The fragility of the structures ensures that in a relatively short time after my departure from a place, nature will once again rearrange the stones according to her own wishes, and the traces of my presence will be swept away.
Unlike many works that seem to celebrate, or emphasise human attempts to dominate or capture the landscape, my intention is the exact opposite.
A recognition that nature is not only more powerful than humanity, but also that she is capable of creating far greater beauty than we could ever achieve. Our role is, therefore, to acknowledge and celebrate this and attempt to reintegrate ourselves harmoniously back into the beauty from whence we came.
If we look to those societies living outside the terrain of the spectacle we can perhaps gain some insight into ways to do this.
“Belief? What do I believe in? I believe in sun. In rock. In the dogma of the sun and the doctrine of the rock. I believe in blood, fire, woman, rivers, eagles, storm, drums, flutes, banjos, and broomtailed horses…”[36][36]
“Whilst the rationalist may try to stand back from events to see an ‘objective’ view, the shaman participates in them.”[37][37]
Our actions, whether in the guise of artist or activist should be aimed at (re)creating a direct reciprocated intervention with the beauty that is life, with what might in earlier times have been called the sacred. This is the construction of situations.
Of course the spectacle can easily take this impulse, drain it of any radical potential and sell it back to us recuperated. Becoming yet another example of the sacred becoming religious dogma, just as revolutionary political ideas have been similarly destroyed:
“Religion’s skin is tougher than its bones. There is no corpse that it cannot dress up in new clothes.”[38][38]
There are many ways in which Capital attempts to recuperate the challenge that radical ecology poses.
It can, as we seen above, divert such impulses down the well-trodden sacrificial path of ritualised political militancy. Anyone who saw, as I did, the physical and emotional costs to eco-activists at Newbury cannot underestimate the effectiveness of such a strategy.
Conversely, it can divert environmental politics into futile reformism and token gestures (something that in content if not in form is also often the fate of the militancy described above). Elections could be fought; media based campaigns waged, even appeals for a ‘kinder, gentler’ capitalism – dovetailing nicely with ‘Green Consumerism’ and enabling capitalism to even make a profit from its opponents.
History has shown us that the desire to feel a (re) connectedness to nature can fuel radical challenges to the dominant class (particularly with regard to property rights)[39][39] but can be also be harnessed by the most reactionary of political currents, not just in the well documented Volkisch and ‘Blood and Soil’ origins of Nazism, but the incorporation of landscape with defining (or redefining) national identity and its development into all kinds of national chauvinism.[40][40]
There are also older mechanisms of control that can be called into play via an ecological stance.
“It is not, however inconceivable that the religious spirit, weary of Churches but not of itself, may find a niche in ecology; that Gaia may be conscripted to lend a semblance of life to those mortal relics of God that still dictate so many actions governed by fear, submission, dependency and repression alternating with temporary release.”[41][41]
In the “New Age” movement we can see this mechanism at work. Not only have healthy and perhaps potentially radical desires to reject the sick industrial catechism of Capital been packaged into easily swallowed lifestyle commodities, but divorced from the social and economic contexts that they originated in they end up helping Capital find new ways of reproducing itself; feng shui offices, the “bare foot doctor”[42][42] and his yuppie Taoism etc.
“I went for a job interview the other day. I kept silent for much of the time and had only to look at the boss to get his attention. I used my skills as a listener – being able to hear an ant scratching itself a hundred miles away – and he was so impressed that he gave me the job.
From this you can learn an important shamanic lesson in self-esteem and empowerment ”[43][43]
The problem for capital is that the reproduction of the spectacle is occurring in ever decreasing circles.
Whilst the New Age movement has been rapidly accepted into the fabric of capital; the contradictions, the potential chinks of light in its armour, have only been thinly papered over. Unlike Christianity where its spectacular role developed in tandem with the growth of capitalism, the “primitivist” urges that have resurfaced in the west still contain a kernel of the outlook of primal society – which we can witness in a struggle to the death with its mortal enemy, our own society, capitalism.[44][44]
To take just one example, that of Navajo sand painting, we can see the strategies used within indigenous cultural practise to attempt to resist its commodification and its appropriation by capitalism.
The Navajo[45][45] are in the front line of resisting American corporate encroachment. When treaties with the U.S. Government created the Navajo reservation, the Navajo Nation, the land was seen as economically worthless and therefore permissible for the expanding USA to leave for the Indians. The Navajo Nation is situated in the deserts of the South West USA straddling the states of Arizona, Utah[46][46], New Mexico and Colorado. Spanish/ Mexican colonists had only made tiny inroads into the desert, and indeed had ground to a halt upon reaching the Grand Canyon, leaving the Navajo (and their neighbours such as the Hopi) pretty much alone[47][47]. However vast mineral deposits have been found in the desert, notoriously uranium, and US mining interests have moved in. The influx of Americans into the area has also increased the cultural pressure upon the Navajo.
The art practise most commonly associated with the Navajo is that of sand painting. Sandpaintings are made from natural materials found locally. Pigments created by the rocks of the desert are used to give colour to the images. These colours – the colours of the desert earth – are holy within Navajo cosmology.
They are deliberately transient, created to last only from sunrise to sunset. At the end of the day the images are swept away by the artist. The power of the image is too great to be invested in permanent, ownable objects:
“ We will not give you this picture. Men are not good as we; they might quarrel over the picture and tear and that would bring misfortune. The black cloud would come again, the rain would not fall. The corn would not grow. But you may paint it on the ground, with the colors of the earth.” (Navajo Creation Story) [48][48]
Such attitudes display a resistance to commodification in an organic sense. When Navajo sandpaintings created in permanent media, essential details are changed or omitted to protect the original. In recent years with popularity of “Indian Crafts” amongst western consumers, and with the proliferation of “Indian Trading Posts” in the South West, has meant that sandpaintings have become extremely marketable commodities. However to create commodities out of a deliberately transient form obviously would contradict the essence of the original practise, and strip the meaning and power from the sandpaintings. Yet at the same time the financial pressures imposed upon the Navajo by the American economy mean that it is necessary for the Navajo to create some kind of income from the eager market of western tourists. The solution that the Navajo have come up with is to create objects that superficially resemble the sandpainting. The ritual and engagement with the landscape is missing, and perhaps more importantly the colours and iconography is changed to withhold the elements of the pictures that are sacred or contain power. The objects thus created are both safe to sell to the tourists, but also are empty of the very things that are vital to significance of the practise of sandpainting to the Navajo.
Other Native Americans (on the North West coast) have subverted the process of commodification and the essence of capitalist expansion through the use of “potlatch”, sometimes described as the “gift economy”. This practise not only completely negates the mechanism of capitalism but also turns it on it s head[49][49].
The significance of practises such as these have not gone unnoticed. The precursors of the Situationist International, the Lettristes, published a review (edited by Debord) entitled “Potlatch”, and a “post–Situ” analysis of the 1992 Los Angles riots was circulated entitled “Rioting and looting as a modern day form of Potlatch”[50][50]
Conclusion……..
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
SERVICE, Robert – Lenin (Papermac) London, 2001. ISBN 0333726286
VANIEGEM, Raoul – The Movement of the Free Spirit (Zone) New York, 1998. ISBN 094229971x
VANIEGEM, Raoul – The Revolution of Everyday Life (Rebel Press/Left Bank Books) London/Seattle, 1994. ISBN 09946661017
DEBORD, Guy – Society of the Spectacle (Zone) New York, 1994.
ISBN 0942299809
LARSON, Peggy and Lane – Sierra Club Naturalist’s Guide: The Deserts of the South West. 2nd edition (Sierra Club Books) San Francisco, 1997. ISBN 1578050529
PERLMAN, Fredy – The Reproduction of Daily Life (Phoenix/Dark Star) London, nd
ISBN 0948984164
ZERZAN, John – Future Primitive and Other Essays (Autonomedia) New York, 1994. ISBN 1570270007
ZERZAN, John – Elements of Refusal (Left Bank Books) Seattle, 1988. ISBN 0939306085
ZERZAN, John (ed.) – Against Civilisation (Uncivilised Books) Eugene, 1999. ISBN 0966775805
MANDER, Jerry – In the Absence of the Sacred (Sierra Club Books) San Francisco, 1992. ISBN 0871565099
WATSON, David – Against the Megamachine (Autonomedia) New York, 1997. ISBN 1570270872
BROOK, Chris – K Foundation Burn a Million Quid (Ellipsis) London, 1997. ISBN 1899858377
KNABB, Ken (ed.) – Situationist International Anthology (Bureau of Public Secrets) Berkeley, 1995. ISBN 0939682001
CAMATTE, Jacques – This World We Must Leave and Other Essays (Autonomedia) New York, 1995. ISBN 1570270201
PLANT, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture, The Situationist International in a Post-Modern Age (Routledge) London 1992.
GUATTARI, Felix. NEGRI, Toni. Communists Like Us (Semiotexte) New York 1990.
DEBORD, Guy. Society of the Spectacle and Other Films (Rebel Press) London 1992
MCLUHAN, Marshall. FIORE, Quentin – War and Peace in the Global Village (Hardwired) San Francisco, 1997.
MATTHEWS, John – The Celtic Shaman (Rider) London, 2001. ISBN 0712614176
ABBEY, Edward – Desert Solitaire (Robin Clark) London, 1992. ISBN 08600721426
ABBEY, Edward – A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (St. Martins Press) New York, 1989. ISBN 0312064888
SAHLINS, Marshall – Stone Age Economics (Tavistock) London, 1974. ISBN 0422745405
GRANDE, John K. – Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose) Montreal, 1998. ISBN 1551641100
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COUPLAND, Douglas – Gereção X (
MARX, Karl – Wage Labour and Capital
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BAHTI, Mark – A Guide to Navajo Sandpaintings (Rio Nuevi) Tucson, 2000. ISBN 1887896058
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[1][1] Quoted in Against the Megamachine page 252.
[2][2] The Revolution of Everyday Life page 52.
[3][3] The “three continents” - a term used by the German left to describe what in English is known perhaps somewhat arrogantly as the “Third World”.
[4][4] Wage Labor and Capital
[5][5] The Reproduction of Daily Life pages 3 – 4.
[6][6] Wage Labor and Capital
[7][7] Although we ought to meet these a lot more easily than our society does. See for example the comparisons between primitive societies and us in Sahlins’ Stone Age Economics.
[8][8] Society of The Spectacle page???
[9][9] The Movement of the Free Spirit pages 72 –73.
[10][10] A turn of phrase that should give the game away.
[11][11] The Movement of the Free Spirit page 17.
[12][12] Its effectiveness might be drawing to close as it is often said, and looks to be true that our generation – “Generation X” – is the first in a thousand years that cannot realistically look forward to a better standard of living than our parents.
[13][13] The Movement of the Free Spirit page 73.
[14][14] That Thing We Do page 55
[15][15] Not counting the body’s “built in obsolescence”
[16][16] “Instructions for taking up arms” Internationale Situationiste No. 6 (1961) in S.I. Anthology page 63
[17][17] For one (sometimes inaccurate) account of the origins of Earth First! In the U.K. see Derek Wall’s Earth First! And the anti-roads movement.
[18][18] Not only were many key figures well-read in Situationist theory, but several had backgrounds in Marxist and anarchist groups.
[19][19] For example activists in Manchester produce a newsletter titled The Loombreaker in a direct reference to an older tradition of revolt.
[20][20] In an attempt (amongst other things) to prevent the construction of the M11 link road.
[21][21] Internationale Situationiste No.9 (August 1964) S.I. Anthology page 139
[22][22] Shortly after destroying his possessions, Landy was taken on a shopping trip to sweatshop clothes retailer “The Gap” by one these wealthy dealers.
[23][23] Situationist graffiti during May ’68 in Paris.
[24][24] Revolution of Everyday Life page 44
[25][25] Revolution of Everyday Life page 202
[26][26] Graffiti sprayed on the National Gallery, London during riots in May 1997.
[27][27] Feral Revolution by Feral Faun in Against Civilisation page 182
[28][28] Not that that the use of the word “guise” should necessarily imply deceit…
[29][29] S.I. Anthology page 22
[30][30] Society of the Spectacle thesis 169
[31][31] Metzger p. 7-8
[32][32] Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (p. 39ff.) contains an early critique of the development of Arches National Park as a “leisure destination”.
[33][33] Ref. to leaflet picked up in Wales
[34][34] Reference to exhibition catalogue
[35][35] ref. to catalogue
[36][36] A Voice Crying in the Wilderness page 7
[37][37] Against the Megamachine page 171
[38][38] Movement of the Free Spirit page 21
[39][39] Darby Landscape and Identity
[40][40] As can be seen here in the U.K. at present with the so-called ‘Countryside Alliance’.
[41][41] Movement of the Free Spirit pages 8-9
[42][42] “Your body is a temple, it is also a night club” Predictably he isn’t even barefoot outside of his commercial sessions!
[43][43] The Celtic Shaman page 179
[44][44] For example in Bougainville, in the Amazon basin, amongst Arctic nomads, at Black Mesa in the Navajo Nation, The Zapatista insurgency and countless other examples.
[45][45] The Navajo do not call themselves “Navajo”, but rather “Diné” meaning “the people”.
[46][46] Which brings its own unique problems for the Navajo – that of the continual harassment of those practising traditional spiritual beliefs by Mormon missionaries.
[47][47] The Chicano population of the South West have their grieviences with the USA following the ceding of “La Raza” to the U.S. in 18?? (see for example Hillerman pages ? – ?), and have started to make common cause with Native American struggles (see for example Matthieson pages ? – ?)
[48][48] Navajo Sandpainting page ??
[49][49] Providing a concrete example of the 1?th century English radical desire to “turn the world upside down.
[50][50] Ref. to Loompanics book….
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