As regular readers will remember, Wit is a psychogeographical warrior
I hold that the only way to properly understand Theresa Duncan's blog - the key, if you will - is through an understanding of the 20th century avant-garde philosophy stretching from surrealism and dadaism through the Situationist International and into more recent permutations such as Neoism and the Luther Blissett Project. Everything else is just sound and fury, signifying nothing. And don't bother googling - you won't find the answers there.
The central idea of the situationists is the importance of games and of play.
In the 1960 “Situationist Manifesto”, Debord et al write: “So what really is the situation? It's the realization of a better game” (Source)
The Situation: this concept, central to the SI, was defined in the first issue of their journal as "A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events." (Source)
'Our action or behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially new type. The most general goal must be to expand the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible... The situationist game is distinguished from the classic notion of games by its radical negation of the element of competition and of separation from everyday life. On the other hand, it is not distinct from a moral choice, since it implies taking a stand in favor of what will bring about the future reign of freedom and play.' --Guy Debord 1957 (Source)
Each person will feel the joy of color, of music; architectonic airs of colored gasses, hot walls of infrareds that provide eternal springtime - we will make it so that man plays from the cradle to the grave, and even death will be nothing but a game. (Source)
It would be pointless and futile, if not insulting, to compress decades of critical philosophy into a soundbite, but I'll attempt it anyway.
The situationists sought to turn everyone into artists, with the art they produce being "situations" (that is, "a game of events"), to create a "total game" wherein the artists (that is, "everybody") are now in full control of their lives. By these means the situationists sought to destroy what they called The Spectacle, which is a sort of virtual reality of total capitalist control that has superimposed itself over true reality. (If you are familiar with Philip K Dick, think of the Black Iron Prison.)
If you look here, under "Basic design principles of Alternate Reality Games" you'll see:
Real life as a medium. The game used players' lives as a platform. ... Participants were constantly on the lookout for clues embedded in everyday life.
The situationists wanted to incorporate games and play into every aspect of everyday life. ARGs incorporate everyday life into games. (This is what dreamsend got superficially right, but fundamentally wrong.)
The situationists main strategies for accomplishing their goal were the dérive and psychogeography (central to their idea of unitary urbanism), and détournement - "the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble". I'll leave it to the interested reader to connect the dots with the "plagiarism" accusations.
The "psychogeography" blog post linked above is in fact a quote and link to an article entitled "THE RALPH RUMNEY'S REVENGE AND OTHER SCAMS: An account on the psychogeographical warfare in Venice during the 1995 Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Arts" by Luther Blissett.
Luther Blissett is both the story-teller and the Mac Guffin of a board-game played on the stage of the world. It is essentially a grim theory of conspiracy which mostly makes use of techniques tested in the Mail Art (Ethe)real Network (MULTIPLE NAMES, 'Add, Pass & Return' creations etc.) in order to manipulate and overturn the language of myths, the archetypes of the popular culture as well as the neo-pagan religious experience. It is a sort of lucid shamanism ... (Source)
The philosophy of Luther Blissett
Luther Blissett is best comprehensible if one takes the viewpoint that life is basically a game.
A game consists of "freedoms", "barriers" and "purposes".
A person playing a game is involved in it to a greater or lesser degree. He looses control over the game the more it becomes compulsive for him. He gets involved with interferences of others, agreements and non-agreements, with creation and destruction, he gets entangled in games not of his own, and in the end he winds up rather being a piece or a broken piece than a player.
One of the most important objectives of Luther Blissett is the rehabilitation of a person as "player" and the rehabilitation of his "spirit of play". (Source)
It is clear, both from the link and her blog in toto, that Theresa Duncan was very familiar with these strategies.
We have to get beyond the bounds of information, into a realm where it overturns and shatters into pieces... *détourner* and go deep into paranoia, push their game up to an extreme paradox, sell distorted stories off to the press bounty-killers... Turn the very logic of the system into our war strategy: media homoeopathy (Source)
"Go deeper into paranoia..."
Another important concept throughout the 20th century avant-garde is the idea of intentionally inducing paranoid states of mind.
Salvador Dali developed the concept of Critical Paranoia for establishing a creative state of self-induced psychosis (Source)
Dali's importance for Surrealism was that he invented his own 'psycho technique', a method he called 'critical paranoia'. He deliberately cultivated delusions similar to those of paranoiacs in the cause of wresting hallucinatory images from his conscious mind. (Source)
He chose to place himself at the disposal of experience, and he chose to place his experience at the mercy of a conscience conceived as an instrument of mystery and a key to the enigma of being. Transports, ecstasies, orgies - what is the secret? The poet, says Baudelaire, is a decipherer, a Kabbalist of reality, a decoder. Ordinary life, if it is not a message in code, a system of symbols for something else, is unacceptable. It must be a cryptogram; it can’t be what it seems. The poet’s task is to decode the incomprehensible obvious. His life becomes a deliberately constructed paranoia, as Rimbaud, Breton, Artaud were to say generations later. (Source)
In fact, the practice of psychogeography itself is inherently paranoid: it is all about discovering hidden connections.
Of course in England a few psychogeographical groups operating in cities like London, Manchester & Nottingham have kept the spirit alive & over the years they have developed a unique framework that combines radical politics, the occult & the composition of the urban environment into a coherent & slightly paranoid ideology.
Psychogeography can be practised as artistic practise, as a branch of urban exploration, as a form of social commentary & often it's all these thing at the same time. Psychogeography also has it's own paranoia in the sense that it believe that any environment can induce behaviour. (Source)
In each book, this crew of “unaccredited genealogists” moves through the landscape, “on the hunt for workable metaphors”, inducing in each other a paranoid intensity of connection, and linking apparently trivial details into compelling patterns.
The connections are so quickly made – connection is at work, too, in the aural overlaps of colonies/mandalas/madness/circles/axis – that the language becomes unstable, and thereby performs its own subject, which is paranoia, nervousness, mania. (Source)
And back to the LBP - remember above, "to manipulate and overturn the language of myths"...
a whole bunch of comrades have focused their attention on an even newer form of that old problem. They committed themselves to a practical exploration of mythologies, in order to understand whether a non-alienating, libertarian deconstruction, re-use and manipulation of myths was possible or not. (Source)
You still need the dots connected? Theresa Duncan was working within an artistic philosophy that included deliberately inducing paranoia, and creating and manipulating personal myths... Figure it out yourself.
The upshot of all this is very simple: as the LBP's actions and Negativland's Helter Stupid album had previously exposed the "unreliable process of cannibalization that passes for 'news'", the post-Duncan period has exposed the moral and intellectual (to say nothing of artistic) bankruptcy of the conspiracy subculture and the entire blogosphere, especially viz. the ritual desecration of a woman's Exquisite Corpse in the furtherance of personal agendas.
The answer, my friends, is not concealed in Theresa Duncan's blog, but it is our hearts, and in our mirrors.
"I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys?' When after all It was you and me."
Fraternally yours,
Luther Blissett
