- Details
- Written by DAMTP
Ben Morea. First of all I really want to apologise – I am not really comfortable in giving talks. I thought more about discuss. I want to give some slight introduction so we have some common ground. And then see what you think. What a term revolutionary animism is about? First of all this word revolutionary is overused … it is like a commercial word now. The revolutionary is a product wherever you look. And the only reason because I use it – even when I feel uncomfortable with it – is that the other word animism is a profound agent of understanding. And it can be entertained on its own. Person can approach animism just for itself… as spiritual life force of animism. But I personally see it as a vehicle for change…the vehicle to detect where to go in a future. For a beginning I will give a small introduction – in the 60-s I was very military activist. And it reached the point where in response to activism people started to be assassinated, eliminated. There were several attempts and I disappeared for 39 years. First 5 years I went to the mountains and lived on a horse back. And then I came out and home stayed completely out of a public domain. I never spoke to the people about my past or my ideas. And after 39 years somebody contacted me and asked me to come out to speak about the 60-s. I actually refused…I was really satisfied with what I was doing. I spent 39 years together with native people. And I was interested in understanding. Rather in the 60-s it was to radicalize and change the word as we new. We understood the political needs, the cultural needs, the artistic needs, the sexual needs, but we had a very little understanding of the spiritual needs. And I felt that was important. It was part of the picture, a puzzle. I fascinated with Native American culture. I felt there is something, a key that we were missing in a materialist Western culture… some understanding what is going to be necessary, but I couldn’t grasp it. And at the point that this physical need for my disappearance became necessary I decided it to be an opportunity to go to the mount native people and I satisfied that interest I had to understand were that missing piece spirt in. And through all 39 years I just get a beginning of understanding. The native people always say that it is a life time education… a life time experience. I don’t feel that after 39 years I understood enough to come back to try, but I understood enough at least to enter into a dialogue to the people about that missing link. Because my feeling was that materialist world which is dominant today and we lack of respect and understanding for the planet itself, that creative forces itself will bring us down. I felt I can use as a metaphor a coin, a materialist coin: the one side is obviously the capitalism, while on the other Marxist communism. They actually both are materialist. I doubt we can survive on a materialist basis. We have to understand we are a part of a larger edifice which is based not on the materialist law.
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- Written by Tae Ateh
Introduction/Įžanga
6th Alytus Biennial: Revolutionary Animism took part on August 18-23, 2015. Every morning at 7AM some of the mostly consistent delgates were drinking a cup of clay dispersed in water. So far the naturaly found radium is apparent in clay, in advance of the event this particular clay was charged with solar energy so it could be shared with comrades. Benas Šarka is the mostly consistent user and promoter of the clay therapy as situochemie in Lithuania. Besides healing and aesthetic purposes he extended the practical use of clay far beyond the boundaries of bourgeois thinking can lead into the proletarian strata: clay as protection, clay as a weapon, clay as building material, clay as protest, clay as hypergraphics, clay as metagraphics, clay sound, clay as intra-personal substrata, clay as inter-personal substrata etc. This is why particularly for this biennial were provided some 3 tones of raw clay, excavated nearby Alytus and left-up for the solar charge and winter freeze to go through – that is how clay comes to life.
6-oji Alytaus bienalė: Revoliucinis animizmas vyko 2015 m. rugpjūčio 18-23 d. Kasdien 7 val. ryte nuosekliausi bienalės dalyviai rinkdavosi gerti vandenyje praskiesto molio, o po to dar užsiimdavo rytine mankšta, kuri nuo 2013 m. tapo integraliu psichostreiko bienalės elementu. Molio unikali struktūra pasižymi tuo, kad jis gali kaupti radiaciją, nes jo sudėtyje yra natūralaus radžio. Dėl šios priežasties bienalės organizatoriai dar iki bienalės renginių minėtą molį pakrovė saulės energija, kad galėtų pasidalinti ja su kitais bienalės delegatais. Benas Šarka yra pagrindinis molio terapijos kaip proletarinės situchemijos ideologas Lietuvoje. Be to jis puoselėja ir kitus (proletarinius) nedegto molio panaudojimo būdus: gydymas, apsauga, plastika, apsirengimas, ginklas, garsas, protestas, statybinė priemonė, metagrafika, hipergrafika). Dėl šios priežasties 3 tonos netoli Alytaus iškasto švaraus molio buvo specialiai atgabenta į bienalės vietą ir palikta pasikrauti saulės energijos bei pergyventi žiemos šalčius – tokiu būdu molis tampa gyvas.
The talk was given situologically – by using few languages which not necesserely were exact translations of things said. So far interpretation we treat as animist phantom it will be left in the text.
Kaip ir visos Beno Šarkos paskaitos ši buvo situologinė: veiksmas ir kalba, kalba ir jos vertimas, klausimai ir atsakymai – viskas susipynė į vieną visumą – taip čia viską ir pabandėme išguldyti. Taigi, vertimai nelabai atitiko originalius pasisakymus, bet greičiau vieni kitus papildė.
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0. Dabar aš parodysiu, kaip geriamas molis.
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- Written by DAMTP
Modern society is a society of cops (destructive workers). We are revolutionaries because the police (destructive workers) are the supreme force of this society. We are not for another society because the police (destructive workers) are the supreme force of all societies. We are not nihilists because we do not grant power to anyone.
We are Lettrists (حروفية psychic workers) for want of something better….
the dérive (psychic workers union) has its limits... It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us. Iron infected our blood.
I
Psychogeography (reproductive work or labour) cannot be abstracted; it must be concrete. The very word psychogeography, (reproductive work or labour), suggested by an illiterate Kabyle to designate the general phenomena with which a few of us were preoccupied around the summer of 1953 (which all of us are preoccupied with throughout all time), is relatively defensible even in times of unrest. ( is most obviously so in all times of confrontation with the destructive workers.) It does not stray from the materialist perspective.
II
Police repression and curfew (destructive workers) draw our eyes towards the ways in which the geographic milieu conditions a situation (psychic work) differently for each of its players and has never acted equally upon the affective comportment of all individuals. Our striving to attain the highest degree of consciousness of the elements that determine a situation (psychic work) demands a full examination of the implications.
III
While race and nationality are cultural – political – constructs, our psychogeographical (reproductive work or labour) experiments have shown that they materially condition (reproductive work) our experience of power and the city, the zones of our residence, our work, our play, our movements, even our ability to fully carry out intellectual inquiry (psychic work).
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- Written by Andrea Gibbons
In an article in Internationale Situationniste #2, Abdelhafid Khattib of the Algerian section of the organisation attempted the first in depth psychogeographical study of the area of Les Halles. The study was cut short due to a continuing curfew against Arabs on Paris streets. As a coda to Khatib’s initial findings, the following note was appended:
This study is incomplete on several fundamental points, principally those concerning the ambient characteristics of certain barely defined zones. This is because our collaborator was subject to police harassment in light of the fact that since September, North Africans have been banned from the streets after half past nine in the evening. And of course, the bulk of Abdelhafid Khatib’s work concerned the Halles at night. After being arrested twice and spending two nights in a holding cell, he relinquished his efforts. Therefore the present – the political future, no less – may be abstracted due to considerations carried out on psychogeography itself.
Despite this promise to consider psychogeography in light of these targeted arrests carried out against colonial subjects, no mention of this incident was to appear in published Situationist writings again.
However, recently discovered among Michèle Bernstein’s previously uncatalogued papers are a draft set of theses on space that show that Khatib’s arrest did have a ripple effect on the thinking of his comrades in struggle. Although critical and historical treatments typically deny her much of a role beyond that of being Guy Debord’s wife, Bernstein, the only prominent woman involved with the loose and shifting groups who formed first the Lettrist and then the Situationist Internationals, wrote numerous articles for Potlatch, Internationale Situationniste and Les Levres Nues, along with two novels. The theses have recently emerged from work to reexamine her oeuvre, and are notable for the way they highlight an awareness – that continued to elude her husband and his confrères – of a key absence in the Situationists’ reimagining of everyday life: colonialism, in all of its ramifications.
Had they been better known, it is plausible that these theses might have radically shifted the thought and direction of Situationism.
They appear here in translation for the first time.
1. Psychogeography cannot be abstracted; it must be concrete. The very word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle to designate the general phenomena with which a few of us were preoccupied around the summer of 1953, is relatively defensible even in times of unrest. It does not stray from the materialist perspective.
2. Police repression and curfew draw our eyes towards the ways in which the geographic milieu conditions a situation differently for each of its players and has never acted equally upon the affective comportment of all individuals. Our striving to attain the highest degree of consciousness of the elements that determine a situation demands a full examination of the implications.
3. While race and nationality are cultural – political – constructs, our psychogeographical experiments have shown that they materially condition our experience of power and the city, the zones of our residence, our work, our play, our movements, even our ability to fully carry out intellectual inquiry.
4. In other words, race and nationality condition each situation we encounter or create, and our human journey through them.
5. Any privilege that comes with race or nationality conditions us as much as any oppression. Since we know with what blind fury so many people – who are nevertheless so little privileged – are willing to defend their mediocre advantages, we must be on guard against its presence.
6. It is hard not to recognise an analogous comportment among the privileged who do not dare speak of problems as they are, as these problems have been made understood to them. One has to wonder: are they the victims of an intimidation racket? Yes, they certainly are. To walk with eyes open exposes those once safe to the possibilities of entering the other side of today’s dialectic of the human relation with capital – the operations of direct exploitation and force.
7. We cannot turn away despite the risks in obtaining a full understanding of the arrangement of the elements of the urban setting, in close relation with the sensations they provoke. It entails bold hypotheses that must be constantly corrected in the light of experience, by critique and self-critique.
8. The dérive as a technique consists of wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influence. Yet the length of the colonial war in Algeria has conditioned and broken the youth of France, creating conditions of overwhelming conformism.
9. It is the colonial subject who can most fully realise the dérive, whose presence alone represents a complete insubordination, whose body tests the first binding upon the possible that must be smashed. This is where we must stand.
10. Starting from this position, some must renounce all that we have, others take back all that we never had. Together we must understand the city to tear down, rebuild, repurpose to create a new way of life. This will be the new dérive.
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- Written by The New Cross Triangle Psychogeographical Association (NXTPA)
Part 1: Alytus, Lughnassadh, 2015 (Report written in anticipation of release for the Winter Solstice, since culture is what is left when all that has been understood is forgotten)
In the summer of 2015 CE, somewhere in a forest in Southern Lithuania, just a few miles from the exact geographical centre-point of Europe, a contingent of psychic workers undertook the construction of a triangular “supercollider” from the ’pataposition of three overlapping orthographic projections of the Kabbalist “Cube of Space”. Here they launched three simultaneous games of three-sided football into each other at high speed, the intense energies released in this “super-superposition” being sufficient to open up higher dimensional space, uncovering the deep triolectics at play within the science of exceptions. In doing so, the assembled situlogists successfully glimpsed the quantum hyperspace of psychogeographic gameplay, completing the first phase in what has been called a “Great Unworking”: Three-sided football’s attempt at the psychogeographical “unbinding” of Europe.
Whilst it had long been decided that our bi -annual festive get-together would be marked by a communal game of three-sided football, initially some debate had taken place as to the exact format this might take. Blissett had, of course, within minutes of arriving, set out our own propositions on the matter to the assembled congress. Blissett and Blissett, as the instantly revocable delegates of the NXTPA, SOF and the Luther Blissett Deptford League, had in fact only arrived in the country the previous evening, having crossed the Konnigsberg bridges at 30,000ft the previous sunset. Still tired from our late night dérive through southern Vinius, a local minibus had spirited us through the sun -soaked pine forests to arrive just in time for coffee.
Blissett presented an informative paper on the 23 varieties of three -sided football, or at least those so far catalogued in the Book of Deptford, whilst Blissett’s report on Triolectical Football in N-Dimensional Space and Kabbalah Quantum Letterism was happily well received by the assembled psychic workers in the hall. In the paper we had suggested that a homeomorphic transformation of the Kabbalah’s Cube of Space - the inspiration for Isou’s Letterist cosmology - had been undertaken by John Dee in the 16th Century, through the use of non-Euclidean, n- dimensional geometry. Presenting the trifurcation of the Cube of Space into the Kabbalists’ Tree of Life (religion), the artists’ colour wheel (art) and the three-sided football field (sport), we demonstrated the hypothesis that through the use of super-superposition (what we opted to call ’pataposition), that it would be possible to experience three-sided football itself in n-dimensional space.
Ateh stated that he too had been considering the possibilities of superposition, whilst Ateh filled in the assembled delegates further upon his important research concerning hidden dimensions of Lettrism at the End of the Age of Divinity. This had, I gathered, been elaborated on at previous congresses, but it was useful for me to have a refresher on such crucial analyses. The afternoon saw us assembling for banner painting, ahead of the planned OPSINA (cOmmitee for the coordination of the psychic workers Plenary to Submit to reproductIve aNd productive workers And dominate destructive workers) psychic attack on the G4S offices at the Swedbank compound in Alytus. We were to carry out the action in solidarity with all those afflicted by its prisons, detention centres and concentrations camps worldwide. Using the collected local clay from the Situchemistry store in order to asemically embellish a number of translucent cloths.
This proletarian medicine was being dished out at morning exercises each daybreak to those willing and able to get up in time, but we noted that it also made an excellent painterly and plastic medium for the patterns and sigils with which we now adorned our garments.
The results, Blissett remarked, were quite satisfactory. Not only that, but I noted that it also reduced our dependence on industrially produced and dubiously sourced pigmentations, whose colonialist patronage is well known. Our newly -embellished drapes were then wrapped about our personages, whilst we transformed ourselves and each other by means of a Situpathic daubing ritual, singing and dancing whilst situlogically transmuting the very forms of our bodies through a transformative morphology of the unique.
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- ALYTUS PSYCHIC STRIKE BIENNIAL #6