Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby dada » Fri Sep 14, 2018 4:45 pm

Would like to qualify this thing I said:

it isn't scary, it's just the way things are in the real surreal, hard science sense, true in that weird, quantumly artful Alice way.


It was a remark made in the context of an exchange between slad and I, in reference to the selections she posted from the Alice in Quantumland book. I'd like to not be misunderstood as being a proponent of pop-science, though. Quantum mysticism is rampant, and I can easily imagine how an offhand comment between friends like that might be misinterpreted. One can't be too careful nowadays.

My view is that mixing classical mechanics and quantum mechanics is a confusion of levels. Something like Schrodinger's Cat is probably supposed to be pointing this out by example. But Schrodinger's Cat has led to all kinds of confusion, so it was a bad example. As Hawking said, "when I hear Schrodinger's Cat, I reach for my gun."

However, I think the confusion arises mostly as a result of a misunderstanding of the implications of discoveries in classical mechanics over the last hundred or so years, more than a misunderstanding of quantum mechanics. Societies have not caught up to basic physics. The nature of timespace, or spacetime is misunderstood at the classical level of mass and energy. Classical concepts of gravity, relativity, energy-mass equivalency, the double-slit experiment demonstrating the wave-particle behavior of light, these are all in the realm of classical physics. Understanding them changes the view of spacetime, without having to get into the quantum mechanics of the massless and close-to-massless level.

But one can't even mention that time is not what we think it is, without being jacketed as a believer in quantum mystic pop-science. Again, I think it has more to do with misunderstanding classical physics. Pop-science only compounds the problem; it's not only attempting to mix levels, it's mixing levels that are both misunderstood.

Pop-science like taking Bell's Theorem and using it to devise theories about 'quantum-entangled consciousness,' and quantum consciousness in general. One has to view the world through a pre-Einstein model, to even go there. Theories about how 'mind influences matter,' can only come about from a total misunderstanding of what matter is, and an ignorance of the nature of spacetime in the post-Einstein classical mechanics scientific view.

The total misunderstanding of consciousness is another matter entirely, another discussion for another thread. I guess this entire post could go in the questioning consciousness thread. Free Revolutionary Art, or Questioning Consciousness? Maybe think of it as a double-slit experiment.

I will say here, though, that I think it's a mistake to think that consciousness occurs at the quantum-level. And leave it at that.

So ignorance of the implications of classical physics, and the confusion of levels leads to most of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Long before struggling with the implications of quantum mechanics, these things need to be cleared up. In my opinion. And we haven't even touched upon the implications of Bohmian mechanics, which suggest that the paths of quantum level particles will be predictable once the correct models are discovered, and the post-holographic model of the unfolding implicate order. Probably a good idea to take it one step at a time.

To better understand the nature of time, though, I think it is probably better to step away from science first. Heresy, I know. This way the mind is freed from the constrictive "science-y" mindset, and keeps it from being infected by pop-science, as well. Once a different view of time can be perceived, then bring it back into the science mindset, for a better understanding of classical physics.

I think Alan Watts might be useful in this instance. But I want to qualify him, as well. It would be easy to go down the Ram Dass 'Be Here Now,' path of the present moment, I want to dispel that notion at the start. The 'present moment,' 'Now,' is defined by the observer. One could just as much say "all time" is now, the present moment, as one could say it's a fleeting second between past and future. I think the fleeting second view is wrong. Plain and simple. But you can make up your own mind, certainly, you don't need me for that. Also, one should always keep in mind that Alan is a corrupter of Western youth, a scheme hatched by British Intelligence for purposes yet to be discerned. Very dangerous, like the Beatles.

Alan Watts, Time (video and transcript)

https://www.organism.earth/library/document/92

So where does this lead, besides scientific clarity.

What, scientific clarity isn't good enough? Scientific clarity might lead to an ecological view beyond biological ecology. We have a ways to go before the biological ecological view is fully understood and accepted, I know. But that's no reason for those who do understand it not to try to understand more. An ecological view of spacetime. Gravitational ecology, how about that.

Or whatever.

Really, whatever. Here, how about some Free Revolutionary Art:

Surkov tweeted, "Yesterday I passed by the Chekhov Monument in Rostov-on-Don, and I wondered why it is that evertime I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun?"

Clever, ain't he? Not free or revolutionary, though.

And no, he isn't talking about Chekhov from Star Trek, reaching for his phaser. Chekhov's gun: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there."

So maybe it's a particle-wave phaser. Chekhov from Star Trek, afterall. A lightgun. Duck Hunt.

Anyway, as an aside;

I don't have a skeleton key, I just keep trying all the keys until one of them works.


Got my press pass yesterday. An official member of the press now, just like a real journalist. Didn't expect it would feel as good as it does, but the possibilities... Kind of feels like a skeleton key. Now I just have to find some worthwhile locks to open with it.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 17, 2018 7:32 am

Major Bellows

Decadence


There is no decadence from the point of view of humanity. Decadence is a word that ought to be definitively banished from history.
Ernest Renan


The word decadence has been thrown about so much it has become a banality. Authorities or would-be authorities of all kinds (religious or political ideologues, the media) lecture to us about the decline of western civilization. On close examination the meaning of this term, whether used as an epithet or as a badge of honor, turns out to be elusive. In a general sense decadence seems to be connected to fatalism, anomie, malaise, and nostalgia. It describes a falling away of standards of excellence and mastery associated with a bygone age of positive achievement; heroism yielding to pettiness; good taste yielding to vulgarity; discipline yielding to depletion, corruption, and sensuality. Decadence has connotations of (over-) indulgence in carnal appetites, derangement of the senses, and violation of taboos. It is supposed to be a frivolous pursuit of exotic and marginal pleasures, novelties to serve jaded palates. Decadence makes you think of sin and over-ripeness.

Physics recognizes a law of decay and decline with universal application to all natural processes. It is called the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy. According to this law, there is a natural and increasing tendency in the universe toward disorder and the dissipation of energy. Efforts to arrest the process of decay and create order are only temporary in effect and expend even more energy. Through this inexorable process of entropy, astronomers tell us, the sun will eventually burn out, and the entire universe may well collapse back upon itself in a "Big Crunch" that will be the opposite of the theorized "Big Bang" with which it supposedly began. There's nothing anyone can do about this cosmic" decadence, but the time frame involved is so immense that there's no point worrying about it, either. Besides, it's just a theory. For the purposes of this essay, I will restrict myself to a consideration of the earthbound and largely historical dimensions of decadence.

Health and Disease
In a grand historical sense, the concept of decadence has been used to describe epochs of civilization in biological metaphor, as beings that are born, come to maturity, then sink into senescence and die because they have been condemned "by History" (or God). In this sense decadence is connected to a moralistic as well as a fatalistic vision. The word implies judgment of human experience on a scale of values and measures it against a "correct" or "healthy" standard. Decadence first appeared as an English word during the Renaissance (according to Webster's, in the year 1549) but its use remained sporadic until the nineteenth century. It can therefore be thought of as primarily a modern concept, and as such it is inescapably linked to the notion of Progress, as its opposite and antagonistic complement.

What lies on either side of Decadence, before or after it, is the myth of a golden age of heroism and (near) perfection. The ancient civilizations tended to place the golden age of their mythologies in the past. Judaism and by extension Christianity and Islam also have a golden age, the Garden of Eden, located in the past. But it is with the monotheistic religions that the dream of cosmic completion was first transferred to the future, in an eschatological and teleological, semi-historical sense. Christian theology underwent a long decay through Renaissance humanism, the Reformation (in particular its unofficial, suppressed antinomian and millenarian currents), and the rationalist, materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment. The French and American revolutions partially destroyed the Christian time line and opened up the horizon of a man-made history. The violent irruption of the bourgeois class into terrestrial political power replaced the inscrutable cosmic narrative written by God shrouded in grandiose myth with a historical narrative authored by abstract Man and wallowing in the Reason of political ideologies. The dogma of determinism survived, however. Apocalypse, Heaven, and Hell were shunted aside by capitalism, which offered instead its absurd dialectic of revolution and reaction, progress and decadence. As the nineteenth century unfolded, liberalism, Marxism, and leftism continued the practice of identifying progress with industrial development and the expansion of democracy.

All of the great epochs of civilization (slavery, oriental despotism, feudalism, and capitalism) are considered by Marxist and non-Marxist historians alike to have experienced stages of ascendancy, maturity, and decline. The Roman Empire is one of the chief paradigms of decadence, thanks largely to the eighteenth-century English historian Gibbon and the French philosophe Montesquieu, the most well known chroniclers of its decline and fall. The reasons for the end of the ancient world are not so obvious, in spite of a familiar litany of symptoms, most of which are linked to economic causes: ruinous taxes, over expansionism, reliance on mercenary armies, the growth of an enormous, idle urban proletariat, the slave revolts, the loss of the rulers' will and purpose in the face of rapid change, and the most obvious and immediate reason-military collapse in the face of the 'barbarian" invasions. These facts don't explain everything. Can it be said that Christianity's rise to power amid the proliferation of cults was an integral part of the decay, or was it rather part of a revolution that transcended decadence? It is not at all clear that the Roman Empire ended according to an iron law of historical determinism. If that were the case, it is not likely that decadence could be imputed to "moral decay." The actual collapse of the Western Empire came centuries after the reign of the most depraved emperors, such as Nero and Caligula. And should it be said that the Empire was decadent, while the Republic was not? Both were supported by the slave-labor mode of production, and both were systems of extreme brutality and constant warfare. The notion of progress and decadence, retrospectively applied to this case, implies that the civilization based on slavery was not only tolerable and acceptable but indeed healthy, in the bloom of its historical youth, and only later became poisoned and morbid.

The same observation applies, of course, to the other ancient civilization of the West—Greece, which was superior to Rome in so many ways because of its democracy and its fine achievements in art, literature, science, and philosophy. The Athens of Pericles is usually considered to have been the high point of that civilization, in contrast to the "decadence" of the Alexandrian or Hellenistic age. But there would have been no Greek art or Athenian democracy without Greek slavery. There is the great tragedy; the beautiful things of civilization have always been built on a foundation of bloodshed, mass suffering, and domination. The other great classic of decadence in the grand historical sense is the ancien regime in France. This example serves as the core vision, dear to the modern Left, of a tiny handful of identifiable villains: the corrupt, obscenely privileged, and sybaritic aristocrats, oblivious to the expiration of their heavenly mandate, partying away on the backs of the impoverished and suffering masses, but who get their just desserts in the end. This was of course a partial truth, but it was built into a myth that has fueled similar myths well into our own time, the classic modern example being that of the Russian Revolution. The great revolution that chases out decadence has been multiplied more than a dozen times since. But this dream that has been played out so many times is still a bourgeois dream, though draped in the reddest "proletarian" ideology. It is the dream of the Democratic Republic, which replaces one ruling class with another, and it has always turned into a nightmare.

Against the decadence of the old world of the feudal clerico-aristocracy, the Jacobins proclaimed the Republic of Virtue. The mode of cultural representation with which the revolutionary bourgeoisie chose to appear at this time—as a reincarnation of the Roman Republic—deliberately broke with Christian iconography. But it set a precedent for conservative, and eventually fascist, cultural ideology—the identification of social health with the classical, the monumental, and the realistic. The Jacobin regime of emergency and impossibly heroic ideals quickly fell, and the entire political revolutionary project of the bourgeoisie in France was rolled back (more than once) by a resilient aristocracy. But the reign of Capital was assured, for its real power lay in the unfolding, irresistible juggernaut of the economy. This juggernaut was already much further under way in England, while in Germany the bourgeoisie advanced only under the banner of philosophy and the arts.

Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century
The triumph of ascendant capitalism in the nineteenth century brought forth an unending cultural and human crisis as the bourgeoisie and its allies in the patriot aristocracy, even while continuing their struggle with feudal monarchy, fought also to contain the Utopian liberatory impulses unleashed by their own initial revolutionary impossibilism. The vaunted progress of the bourgeoisie—technological conquest of nature, industrial pollution, dull-minded positivist rationalism, and philistine demand for the proof of usefulness—had resulted not in a best of all possible worlds, but rather in a massive degradation of human experience. In addition to the proletarians enslaved in the factories, there were rebellious souls from more privileged social strata (the bourgeoisie itself, very often the aristocracy, and the middle classes) who revolted against the new conditions of alienation, in which Modernity and Progress were leading to disintegration of the self and nausea at the corrosion of spiritual values. These people looked to the demimonde of La Boheme ("the realm of the Gypsies") as an escape from and protest against bourgeois life. Art no longer in service, as it had been for centuries, to autocratic and ecclesiastical patronage, became "for itself." France, and more particularly Paris, became the great laboratory of social and cultural experiment outside the margins of respectability began the march of artistic "isms" seeking to negate the commercial reality of the bourgeois reign and always succumbing to recuperation by that commercial reality.

The term La Decadence refers specifically to a period of European cultural history covering roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth century and sometimes the beginning of the twentieth century as well. This period, also commonly known as the fin de siecle or the belle epoque, encompassed such movements as Symbolism, Art Nouveau (Jugendstil), Post-Impressionism, and the Parnassian poets, as well as those referring to themselves as Aesthetes or Decadents. The phenomenon of Decadence is best understood as the continuation and denouement of an earlier movement—Romanticism. Decadence and Romanticism are of a piece.

The Romantic movement began definitively late in the eighteenth century as a largely aristocratic revolt against the soulless, destructive engine of Capital's Industrial Revolution. The countries principally affected by these developments were England, France, and parts of the German-speaking world. (The second wave of the Industrial Revolution occurred later in the nineteenth century and involved Germany, Northern Italy, Japan, European Russia, and the United States.) Although Romanticism, and later Decadence, resonated throughout Europe and the United States, their main centers of activity were always Paris and London. Throughout the course of the nineteenth century there was a lively exchange of influence between French and English poets, writers, and painters. In this essay I am concerned mostly though not exclusively with developments in France.

More Definitions
The word romantic is often contrasted with the word classical. The distinction between the two, originally drawn by Goethe and Schiller, consists basically in this: Classical is associated with naturalness, intellect, balance, universality, and rationalism; romantic with the revolt of worldly ideas, passions, and spontaneity against conservative, ascetic, or chastened ("uptight") ideals. This is strikingly similar to the distinction Nietzsche was later to make between the Dionysian and the Apollonian sensibilities. The reference in that case was to the Dionysiac movement of sixth century BC Greece, which saw itself as a revolt of mystical, chthonic nature against the solar divinities of the Dorians. Dionysus was the god of wine and revelry, Apollo the god of the sun and the leader of the muses. From this example it can be seen that Romanticism has precursors going back to antiquity. (Another example of ancient revelry with contemporary survivals was the Roman holiday of Lupercalia, a time of riotous feasting, fornication, and fun. The Catholic Church found itself obliged to co-opt many of the pagan holidays because it could not suppress them. This was the case with Lupercalia, which persists to this day in such forms as the Mardi Gras of New Orleans and the Carnival of Rio de Janeiro.) Although there may be an antagonism between the classical and the romantic, classicism can be a moment of romanticism (i.e., in the attempt at reviving pagan antiquity or any vanished civilization). Nietzsche saw both the Apollonian and the Dionysiac worldviews as essential elements of human nature.

"Romantic" first appeared in English around the middle of the seventeenth century and originally meant "like the old romances." It looked back with nostalgia to the chivalrous and pastoral world of the Middle Ages, when the Romance languages were becoming differentiated from Latin, or, going back still further, to the epic tales of ancient Greek heroes. The sensibility connoted by the word as used at that time stood in contrast with the growing rationalism of the Enlightenment, which, as the brother of commerce, was obsessed with the mundane and the quantitative. Many of the major themes that were to preoccupy the Romantics–the fantastic, the macabre, the wild and mysterious, the satanic and infernal–were also prefigured in the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. As a flight of the imagination, Romanticism found expression in all the arts, but was perfectly suited to the medium of literature. It is significant that the English word "novel" has as its equivalent in both French and German the word roman. "Romantic" has affinities with other words such as "romanesque," "gothic," "baroque" (all used to describe successive styles of architecture since the fall of the western Roman Empire and meaning by turns, fabulous, chimerical, grotesque, and flamboyant); and pittoresque (picturesque).

That last word, French but Italian in origin (pittoresco), described not only a scene, a landscape in particular, but also the emotions it induced in the observer. It was the feeling sought by young English gentlemen of the eighteenth century who were sent by their families on the "Grand Tour" of Italy to round out their education. (This practice preceded but may very well have launched the era of mass tourism.) Here they would admire classical ruins, Renaissance art treasures, and the wild beauty of the Alps, and perhaps hope to meet an intriguing princess or countess. Italy was also attractive to German intellectuals and artists. Goethe, Mendelssohn, and Nietzsche are among those who either traveled or lived there.

The most influential and archetypal figures of Romanticism were George Gordon, Lord Byron and D.A.F. de Sade (the "divine Marquis"). These men pursued with uncommon vigor the beauty of the perverse and explored the mysterious bond between pleasure and pain. They were the most visible incarnations of aristocratic monstrosity and excess. The figures of vampire, Satan, demon lover, sadist, evil genius, and noble bandit they represented became much-imitated sources of inspiration to later generations of writers, among whom were Baudelaire, Huysmans, Swinburne, D'Annunzio, and many others.

There are some distinctions between High Romanticism and Decadent Aestheticism, in spite of their essential affinity. In Romanticism, Man is strong and cruel (e.g., the Byronic, Promethean, or Faustian hero) while Woman is weak and victimized; in Decadence the roles of the sexes are reversed. Romanticism is concerned with action and furious passion; Decadence is passive and contemplative. Romanticism often championed revolutionary social ideals, represented most notably by the English Romantics' initial identification with the Great French Revolution, and also by support for national liberation or unification movements in Italy, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Latin American republics–Wagner and Baudelaire both turned up on the barricades in 1848-49. These kind of commitments had largely faded by the time of the Decadence, which occurred in an unusually extended epoch of relative social peace and which tended for the most part to disdain politics in favor of l'art pour l'art. Baudelaire himself disavowed political involvement in favor of dandyism. Those artists of the later nineteenth century most concerned with social critique were of the realist and naturalist schools and identified with socialism, such as Courbet and Zola. This situation began to change, however, in the 1890s, as I will discuss later.

The Decadent aesthetic can be summarized as follows: the quest for the rare, sublime, and ultrarefined; the rejection of natural beauty; antifeminism; and the celebration of "perversion" and artificiality.

Gotterdammerung
A salient feature of the fin de siecle was the advent of a great religious crisis that had been building up steadily since the Revolution. The Roman Catholic Church, which had been losing ground for a long time (since Copernicus), saw its authority decay more rapidly than ever before the advances of nineteenth-century positivist science. The spiritual vacuum produced by this led to what could be called the first stirrings of the "New Age": the resurrection of heterodox spiritual practices from previous epochs; such as Satanism, occultism, and Rosicrucianism. fascination with vampires, werewolves, etc.; and a burgeoning interest in Eastern doctrines, such as Mme Blavatsky's Theosophical Society, which was imported into France by way of Britain and the United States. Many French and English (or Irish) writers and poets adhered to Roman Catholicism as a purely aesthetic ritual emptied of faith. Needless to say, they were scorned by the Church.

The spirit of gloom and decline among the Decadents was fed by the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, a philosopher of passive nihilism par excellence who became more popular in France than he had ever been in his native Germany. Schopenhauer's central concept was that life is pointless suffering and that the only pleasures are cerebral, fleeting, and negative. His advice to humanity was to drop dead, literally. In a strong echo of Buddhist or Hindu doctrine, he said that it is best to renounce sexual and all other desire: the Ideal is the nirvana of nonexistence. The Decadents followed this prescription for stone-cold reverie and agreed with his profound misogyny as well.

The wish for annihilation found expression in a great lament over the decline of Latin civilization. The Decadents sought to reconstruct poetically the vanished worlds of ancient Rome, Byzantium, and the Hellenized Orient. They had a keen sense that Paris and London were the new Byzantium or Babylon. In France especially the feeling of decline was acute because of the humiliation of defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1871, coupled with the knowledge of lagging behind England in economic power and development.

Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll
The use of drugs, which previously had been the exotic vice of a few (e.g., De Quincey's and Coleridge's indulgence in laudanum) became widespread at the end of the nineteenth century. Absinthe, also known as the "green fairy;' was one of the most popular, and for a long time legal, alcoholic drugs. Morphine had been used extensively for the first time as a surgical anesthesia by both sides during the Franco- Prussian War, and the French conquest of Indo-china in the 1870s and '80s brought in a large quantity of opium. Many literary productions of this time were concerned with descriptions of drugged, hallucinatory states of consciousness, though none measured up to De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).

The Romantics and Decadents emphasized eroticism as the driving force of culture. The expression of Desire as power, deceit, cruelty, and unlimited egotism and love of crime was first explored in excruciating detail by Sade and by his contemporary, Choderlos Laclos. There had been eroticism in literature since Chaucer and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, but it wasn't until the late eighteenth century that there was a lot of sexual imagery in western culture. From then on, the assertion of the animal nature, in all its 'polymorphous perversity' of humans appeared with increasing occurrence to blaspheme Christian dogma, tweaking the noses of the Catholic Church in France and the Protestant churches in England (though the great majority of the bohemian rebels in question, including the English ones, were Catholic, either by upbringing or by conversion). The themes of narcissism, male homosexuality, lesbianism, sadomasochism, incest, and hermaphroditism or androgyny that appear frequently in the literature of Romanticism sometimes provoked wrath and repression from the authorities. The Marquis de Sade spent the greater part of his adult life in prison, having been sentenced repeatedly by both ancien regime and Revolutionary courts, not so much for his deeds as for his unacceptable imagination; Oscar Wilde was broken by the scandal, trial, and prison sentence that resulted from his love affair with another man.

The late nineteenth century was a time of expanding knowledge about human sexuality (part of a process, going on since the Renaissance, of recovering the eroticism that had been so freely accepted in the ancient world), and the art and literature of the time seemed to have an understanding of the unconscious basis of the sexual drive. In the 1880s Sigmund Freud was a student in Paris, studying under the neurologist Charcot, who conducted research on a condition that was then known as hysteria. Other pioneering efforts at a more or less scientific understanding of the psychology of sex included Richard von Krafft-Ebing's inventories of perversions, Havelock Ellis's classifications, and the writings of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. In light of contemporary views, some of these efforts may seem to have been fruitful (or at least interesting); others may be seen as faulty or inadequate due to Victorian, bourgeois, and patriarchal biases. At the time they served chiefly to debunk romantic love.

The Decadents took a dim view of love between men and women. Much of the time they made Woman the target of their spleen (nearly all the artists were male). Women were held in contempt as creatures enslaved to nature and instinct and incapable of reason. This trend was part of an overall fascination with and fear of nature as a dark, fecund, and devouring force. One of the most familiar motifs of the Decadence was that of the femme fatale, sphinx, and "Belle Dame sans Merci" (Keats), who victimized men, tearing them to pieces or otherwise luring them to madness, ruin, and death. Cleopatra, the Queen of Sheba, Carmen, Helen of Troy, and many versions of the Judith/Salome theme were familiar characters in the art and literature of the fin de siecle. The connection between pleasure and pain was extended into a bond between love and death. This eventually reached the point of becoming a mirrored inversion of Christianity's war against the body and its equation of sexual pleasure with sin and damnation. Pissing on the altar was another form of worship, and indeed, some rebels and apostates became prodigal sons and returned to the bosom of the Mother Church or some other "true faith" (as was to be the case among the Surrealists as well).

Continues: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... -decadence
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby dada » Mon Sep 17, 2018 1:48 pm

So, what does this tell you. The war between Apollo and Dionysus is akin to tweedledumb and tweedledee agreeing to have a battle. Choosing sides in that game deforms one, makes one into half of a person, one 'side' of the psyche atrophies. The perspective becomes hopelessly warped through one or the other lens.

Dionysus and Apollo are subordinates. The nihilist is a denialist. They all serve as soldiers in the army of the living. The war isn't between archetypes, or a struggle between romantic and classical notions. The living has declared war on the dead. Attacking what they fear most. The rest is window dressing, psychological ops to win hearts and minds in support of the living's war against the dead.

The Free Revolutionary Artist isn't deceived by the overtures of the army of the living. The gothic undead are not, either. They are spies behind enemy lines.

Know which side you're fighting for. Choose freely, don't be swayed by the propaganda of the fearful living.

Oh, the living can't achieve victory, by the way. They've picked a fight they can't win. Although if you need to be reminded of that, it's probably already too late for you. You're already boxing with shadows. Aiming at an invisible enemy, like this guy:

Haunted Library (PM 6-15-80).gif


Don't be on the losing side. Honor the dead.
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Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby American Dream » Mon Sep 17, 2018 2:46 pm

A blessing on their houses, but I wouldn't live in a one of them.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby Sounder » Mon Sep 17, 2018 6:56 pm

This represents and illustrates an opinion expressed by me in the past. That is that we are better off trying to evolve our consciousness rather using material things as a proper metric. Such as tickets and punitive measures. Sanctions? Yes, we could use some fresh expressions of art.



https://www.activistpost.com/2018/09/ci ... ckets.html

By John Vibes

Despite the fact that our species has had many years to perfect how we travel in cars, fatality rates continue to rise and roads are just as dangerous as ever.

Instead of trying something different, most governments throughout the world continue to double-down on their outdated and ineffective strategies, mostly involving extortion, which has done nothing to improve road safety.

There are some areas where radical solutions have been attempted, and in many cases, these different strategies have had extremely impressive results.

One of the most interesting experiments in traffic flow was pioneered by Bogotá mayor Antanas Mockus, who fired a large portion of the city’s cops and offered to retrain and rehire them as mimes.

“In a society where human life has lost value. There cannot be another priority than re-establishing respect for life as the main right and duty of citizens,” Mockus says.

Instead of writing tickets, the mimes were unleashed upon the city to direct traffic, while applauding good drivers and mocking bad ones. Surprisingly, the city saw a 50 percent drop in traffic fatalities, less congestion, and an overall better culture of driving.


Jane Mansbidge of the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics at Harvard, recently had Mockus in to speak in front of one of her classes about his experiment.

“We found Mayor Mockus’ presentation intensely interesting. Our reading had focused on the standard material incentive-based systems for reducing corruption. He focused on changing hearts and minds – not through preaching but through artistically creative strategies that employed the power of individual and community disapproval,” Mansbidge said.

“He also spoke openly, with a lovely partial self-mockery, of his own failings, not suggesting that he was more moral than anyone else. His presentation made it clear that the most effective campaigns combine material incentives with normative change and participatory stakeholding. He is a most engaging, almost pixieish math professor, not a stuffy ‘mayor’ at all. The students were enchanted, as was I,” she added.

Bogotá ’s experiment shows that people can voluntarily police themselves, especially with some peaceful and lighthearted help from a non-threatening third party

“It was a pacifist counterweight. With neither words nor weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance of cultural regulations,” Mockus said.

Solutions like these work more often than people think. Ideas that represent radical departures from the control and punishment-oriented culture that our species has known for so long, actually offer an opportunity for true progress. Unfortunately, it seems that these types of solutions are only seriously considered when conditions are extremely desperate and people have nothing else to lose.

In the situation of Bogotá , they had some of the most dangerous roads on the planet before they embarked on this radical experiment. This is very similar to the way that Portugal experimented with drug legalization when they were facing some of the worst overdose and addiction rates in the developed world.
All these things will continue as long as coercion remains a central element of our mentality.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby dada » Mon Sep 17, 2018 11:24 pm

That mime traffic cop thing is nice. Art, I guess, but it isn't free or revolutionary. Art in a social support role, produced by the fashion artist as barista in the service economy, as most art is, and artists are. That would be academic art, for different thread.

Free Revolutionary Art isn't for earning pleasant points in the credit system, it doesn't mach uns frei, or 'make the world a better place.' Free Revolutionary Art is more like this. From page four of this thread:

--

Boy, now we're really getting somewhere.

Getting somewhere is just a figure of speech though. Really we're getting nowhere. And that is what free revolutionary art forces the viewer to face, simply by its presence. Some face it, some pretend they don't see it, try their best to ignore it. Some wish it would go away, nostalgically pining for lost innocence of sleepy days before the bad, mean person irrevocably altered the conventional rules of the social games they were taught in college, forever. Some run to the hills, run for your life. But it catalyzes something for everyone, even if only subconsciously for some. It speeds up the 'wheels of karma' grinding away inside of the little crystallized ego, turns up the heat under the jiffypop lifestyle. It's absurd, sometimes. When necessary.

It could even be New Joycean, don't you believe it. Where does a New Joycean go on vacation? To du jour, of course. That's a beach in the south of France.

--

For a more comprehensive definition, see the full post. Not that it will make things any clearer, but it probably won't make them any less clearer, either.

American Dream wrote:A blessing on their houses, but I wouldn't live in a one of them.


If they're haunted houses, I might consider renting.

You know, they say blessings are on the head of the just. But, just what? I wonder...
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby Sounder » Wed Sep 19, 2018 4:09 pm

Each to their own I guess. The good mayor has done a thing that fits criteria that IMO qualifies as being free revolutionary art. It is free of ideological coloring, a clear impediment to freedom in art. It is revolutionary in the sense that it's a radical change.
And it's represents money spent on mimes rather than on cops, so it is art on more than one level.

Yet beyond any labels it can be seen as an example of an emerging (continuum based) narrative that will subsume the current small minded yet still dominant narrative, based on a split model of reality that has resulted in the institutionalization of manipulation and coercion.

In the emerging narrative the other is not a threat, rather he/she is an ally whose potentials are best learned about through positive engagement.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby dada » Thu Sep 20, 2018 1:09 am

Sure, whatever. You could even wax poetic about mime traffic cops if you like, I don't care. That's just not what this thread has been about, that's all.

---

Anyway, I was contacted by my commercial intelligence agency handlers a few days ago, and they tell me I've been reassigned. I've been giving them the brush off, but you can only put these things off for so long. At some point boss shows up.

This last time round the mulberry bush has been fun. Sorry for having to go so abruptly, but duty calls. Anyone can still drop me a pm, I'll get it, email tells me when that happens. But really, who will. I know how it is.

Jack wrote:Now you'll dispute even that, and it goes on.


But you see, all good things do come to an end. So it looks like you were right, Jack, I did dispute it.

Boss looking at his watch. Well, mischief managed, as the dopey wizards say. Stupid wizards.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby dada » Sun Sep 23, 2018 9:54 pm

Going through my posts from the last year or so, lifting worthwhile rants, and I came upon this Oscar Wilde quote posted by Cordelia in the Lies and Liars thread:

“Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”
~ Oscar Wilde from 'The Decay Of Lying'


I had responded:

I often agree with Oscar, but not on this point. Art is aiming for more than a bourgeois escapism. And the best art isn't aiming for anything at all.


But when it scrolled by on my screen today, I wondered if maybe I misunderstood Oscar, and he was actually making the same point I was. Instead of puzzling over this, I thought maybe I might actually read The Decay of Lying and find out.

http://virgil.org/dswo/courses/novel/wilde-lying.pdf

Turns out it doesn't matter whether or not we were making the same point. However, Oscar made his case so well that he "proved it to my dissatisfaction," as Cyril says to Vivian in the piece. So I've changed my mind; I unreservedly agree with Oscar on this point.

I'd post some selections, but I don't see why that is necessary. Very relevant to the 'time ghost' though, as well as the topic of this thread.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby dada » Wed Sep 26, 2018 12:40 am

Musing over a quote from Esther Leslie's Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, posted on page three of this thread. Not coming to any conclusions, just half-formed 'thots.' She begins:

"The logic of unfettered development, anticipated under capitalism only in the realm of art, turns worker-producers into authors, creative co-participants in the articulation of texts. This element of co-participation, made possible by, variously, technology and technique, determines the revolutionary status of a cultural product."

So the logic of unfettered development turns worker-producers into authors, 'creative co-participants in the articulation of texts.' Already here is a challenge to the legitimacy of the social structure. Political power, the power to control or influence behavior, is in the hands of worker-producer authors as creative co-participants. And there is nothing inherently revolutionary in any cultural product, no matter how revolutionary-seeming, because it's this element of co-participation which determines the revolutionary status. Creative co-participation by worker-producers as authors is revolutionary act. Creative co-participation implies a leveling of the playfield. Social status and revolutionary status are incompatible. There is no revolutionary status for a cultural product within the social structure. Esther continues:


"He [Benjamin] lashes out against a recent German intellectual fashion. The new objectivists, contends Benjamin, had claimed to want to destroy capitalist relations of production, but they had functioned as counter-revolutionaries because of their refusal to regard the relationship of the author to Technik politically. Benjamin's critical revolutionary art practice is not satisfied simply with using technology to produce art. The new objectivists use photographic technology to counter-revolutionary effect, through participation in the market-friendly logic of fashion and empathy. Crucial to Benjamin's rejection of new objectivist photographic practice is his refusal of its passive model of reception, a model that ensures the potential of technological culture for representing conditions of existence is converted into political paralysis. It dissuades its audiences from active critical engagement with cultural artifacts, misusing technology to elicit contemplative responses"

This "refusal to regard the relationship of the author to Technik politically" is precisely that which robs a cultural product of any political power. It's the refusal to accept the leveling of the playfield that makes one who claims to want to 'destroy capitalist relations of production' into a counter-revolutionary.

And I wonder, am I participating in the market-friendly logic of fashion and empathy, posting on this message board to counter-revolutionary effect? Are my cultural products robbed of political power when I quote Esther Leslie quoting Walter Benjamin? I decide that it depends on what I do with Esther and Walter, how I treat them. Co-participating as a worker-producer as author, not 'responding contemplatively,' but with 'active critical engagement.' In this way I refuse the 'passive model of reception' of the message board format.

Although I can't lay the blame for this 'passive model of reception' entirely on the format, because I think it's the practice that is the greater cause. Like the photographic practice of the new objectivists, it's the same "refusal to regard the relationship of the author to Technik politically" which ensures that the potential of technological culture for representing conditions of existence is converted into political paralysis.
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Re: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art

Postby dada » Fri Sep 28, 2018 7:10 am

The free revolutionary artist doesn't insult the intelligence of the viewer while bruising the ego. The free revolutionary artist expresses uncomfortable realities with improper placement of apparent absurdities. As it is said in the tao te ching, "Truthful words may seem to be the reverse of worldly practices." The free revolutionary artist acts according to the natural way with precision timing of swiss watch springs.

"The chemistry of life is a tremendous challenge, and I realized I could spend my life studying the pubic hair on a rat, and although I would be the world's foremost expert on the subject, I might still not be able to explain why it is curly." - Dr. Eugene Jarvis

Why is it curly? A question for message board water coolers. The free revolutionary artist is aware of surroundings at all times, does not refuse to regard the relationship of the author to Technik politically.

"I didn't want to end up like my colleagues... bored shitless and sitting around talking about their lawn sprinkling systems, as they toughed out another coffee break on the road to oblivion." - Dr. Jarvis

The chemistry of life is a tremendous challenge.
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