Private Space, Private Lives by David Bell (AntiClockWise #20)

The movement towards a total free market cloaked under a banner of mythic individual choice has created a divided state, and has greatly diminished public assets. National industries, council houses, health care and almost all traditionally state-run sectors have been sold off, one by one, to large private corporations; in contradiction to the so-called ‘share owning democracy’ which only serves, in fact, to encourage very undemocratic greed. What we are witnessing is the end of true collective consumption. The new urban underclass may have the vote (though this has itself been semi-privatised, as popular fears over poll tax non-payment still deter people from registering as electors) unlike their historical counterparts, but they have little else. And, most importantly, they have less and less truly public space in which to congregate – and agitate. Privatising property in all its forms is perhaps the most invidious trick of current policies.

Housing has become almost fully the domain of financial institutions and petty private landlords, re-classing decent accommodation not as a right, but as a market dominated privilege. The ability to pay directly dictates our access to housing stock. Alternative forms of home have all been attached, with the attack legitimised through sinister tools such as the poll tax – a direct charge upon the individual. Any so-called deviant living spaces become framed as the habitat of scroungers and shirkers. In this way, police harassment of travellers, communes and squatters is sanctioned. Further, recent changes in waterways law are designed to limit living rights on canals, clearing them for leisure use.

The state approved ideal of for housing is the insular, anonymous housing estate, where Neighbourhood Watch schemes encourage private crime prevention and where housing design, street layout and estate location all act against true community feeling, instead encouraging nosiness, avarice and introversion. The ultimate landscape expression of this housing ideal is the private estate, with an enclosing wall, a guarded gate and home owner control through residents’ associations – yet another excuse to encourage busy-bodying and social apartheid. The old neighbourhood covenants of the USA, which allowed residents to block estates access for black families, have become a clear reality in the private estates of the new bourgeoisie. Truly, these are the present day equivalent of the landlord controlled ‘closed villages’ of the nineteenth century.

A second echo of history is found in increasing corporate ownership of space. Retails, office and business park developments which often stimulate the influx of middle class workers who ‘yuppify’ nearby housing, driving local tenants out, are the patrician landscapes of late capitalism. Good workers are rewarded, undesirables are hounded out. The corporation has total control over the design and use of space, with private security firms enforcing the rule of law. Panoptical surveillance of grudgingly permitted visitors constantly observes, and instantly acts against, any perceived threat to order. The scale and opulence of these developments dwarfs any anthropometric elements around them, while token heritage-ised gestures at contextual fit, unfulfilled job-creation promises for locals and vacuous public art projects merely patronise, alienate and insult the pushed aside local community. The creation of new sizeable urban structures pays no regards to the permeability of the city fabric, cutting across pedestrian thoroughfares, and the design of new buildings, with reflecting skins of mirror-glazing or bland outer walls (the valued community – those who work/shop/do business there – only see the palatial insides and the welcoming entrances) yield nothing, project nothing, offer nothing back. As Britain follows the American path of increased mall-ing, so we witness the sea change in leisure activity. Shopping in the number one state sanctioned pastime; advertisers and retail mega-chains push commodity fetishism to its logical extreme. In parts of the US, the answer to diminished recreational facilities (often casually linked to rising crime) has been to open malls for 24 hours. ‘Shut up and shop’ should now be rewritten as ‘Shut off and shop’: commodity zombies will only revolt when shops are empty. When urban street violence does occur, looting is a major activity; instead of attacking commodity culture the rioters show clearly their earnest desire to join in. Multinational insurance companies make sure no-one loses out, just as ‘stock shrinkage’ is written into company accounts to allow for shoplifting. Calls to revoke the Sunday trading ban in Britain show the extent to which consumerism has become the opium of the people. The private mall is today’s cathedral. The Disneyfied ‘supermalls’ currently crossing the Atlantic show how cynical this new religion has become. Like Pray TV, all modern gods must offer up a modern spectacle in return for souls – and money.

The flipside of modern consumerism is individualised leisure activity. The personal stereo represents private playtime; covering our ears to cries for mass rebellion, we prefer to listen to Bryan Adams romanticising a mythical rabble rouser. At home, we watch videos of a dark future of privatised law-enforcement and complete corporate domination, while outside it develops as a present day actuality. The end result of individualised playtime is virtual reality arcade game based upon the urban riots. Enclosed in a simulation of petrol bombs and mob rule, players can act out revolution and go home happy. Meanwhile, popular forms of mass leisure are under attack; increasing media and corporate control of football (through sponsorship) means ever more executive stands, ever fewer terraces. The ID card scheme and the introduction of all-seater stadia, legitimised by media exaggerated focus on hooliganism, together with the proposed ‘super league’, furthers the move towards privatised football. Instead, we are funnelled into private leisure complexes to watch movies or play ten-pin bowling.

It is not only urban space which is being increasingly corporatised.  A recent disclosure revealed a government scheme to sell off vast tracts of forest, and most of the small islands surrounding Britain are in private hands, each one a miniature kingdom – and a sound investment. Here, once more we hark back to past times, when land became a rime symbol of wealth. Aged rock stars, TV presenters and corporate bosses are today’s ‘arriviste’ landowners. The theft of Britain’s countryside continues unabated, and even supposedly public bodies, such as the National Trust, slip quietly towards privatisation, blocking access to their lands, and ‘forgetting’ to reveal them to mapmakers. The continued annual mass trespasses of the Ramblers Association are testament to the longevity of this struggle and of its continued relevance today.

Bus services have been removed from state ownership, with the rail network soon to follow. Inevitable rationalisation of these transport services places complete emphasis on private car ownership. After forcing this move upon us, we become faced with a new twist: privatised toll roads. The whole road network pays only token regard to pedestrians, to cyclists, to the land through which is cuts, and to the environment which is destroys. Less than a tenth of car tax is spent on roads. With this huge amount of revenue being pulled in from a population seduced and forced into using cars, to be used by the government at whim, is it any wonder that nothing gets done to earnestly reduce traffic? Meanwhile, private car parks eat up vast tracts or urban land, and roads cut swathes through communities.

Perhaps the most sinister conclusion to reach from surveying the sum of privatised space in Britain is the loss of the right of freedom of assembly by the simple fact that there is no longer exist places where people can freely assemble. All acts of rebellion have become ritualised, and are carefully marshalled, channelled and media covered. The fact that they do happen – that they are allowed to happen – testifies to their lack of real threat. Further, by minimising public space and thereby dictating our use of places, spontaneous and creative acts between inhabitants are curtailed. Wherever we come together, we are watched and controlled. Freedom itself has been privatised. From sterile new towns to money hungry toll roads, from video arcades to shopping arcades, and from unyielding office blocks to unwelcoming city nights, space is no longer communal public property. It is in elite hands, and those hands have a vice-like grip on all aspects of our lives, especially those which might subvert or overthrow them, if ever given the chance.

The Nihilist Papers – Pieces from AntiClockWise

Throughout the 20 issues of AntiClockWise the subject of nihilism recurred regularly and was addressed by several correspondents. These forays, with a couple of repetitions, are reproduced here.

AntiClockWise #1 Nihilism – Raoul Vaneigem; K. Eliot; ACW

AntiClockWise #7 Nihilism – Edited from IS 11, 1967 in Leaving the 20^th Century by Chris Gray

AntiClockWise #15 Nihilists – Extracts from letters from Elliot Cantsin and from a Liverpool correspondent

AntiClockWise #16 Oh no, a rant against nihilism – Paul Petard

AntiClockWise #18 The Sauce of the Nihil – Feral Faun

AntiClockWise #20 Nihilism: Replies – Paul Petard; Matthew Fuller

NIHILISM – Raoul Vaneigem (Take from The Revolution of Everyday Life) (AntiClockWise #1) “We don’t know where we’re going and, frankly, we don’t care”

Rozanov’s definition of nihilism is the best. “The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn round … No more coats and no more homes.”

Nihilism is born of the collapse of myth. Until its abolition, the spectacle can never be anything except the spectacle of nihilism.

For the last century and a half, the most lurid contributions to art and life have been the fruit of free experiment in the field of abolished values.

Paradox:- a) the great propagators of nihilism lacked an essential weapon, the sense of historic reality, the sense of the reality of decay, erosion, fragmentation; b) those who have made history in the period of bourgeois decline have been tragically lacking in an acute awareness of the immense dissolvent power of history in this period.

Nihilism sweeps everything before it, God included.

How long must we bear the hegemony of these communist bureaucrats, fascist brutes, opinion makers, pockmarked politicians, sub-Joycean writers, neo-Dadaist thinkers – all preaching the fragmentary, all working assiduously for the Big Sleep and justifying themselves in the name of one order or another: the family, morality, culture, the flag, the space race, margarine etc. NIHILISM SWEEPS EVERYTHING BEFORE IT, GOD INCLUDED. NIHILISM IS A SELF DESTRUCT MECHANISM: TODAY A FLAME, TOMORROW ASHES …

Anyone who combines consciousness of past renunciations with a historical consciousness of decomposition is ready to take up arms in the cause of the transformation of daily life and of the world.

The active nihilist does not simply watch things fall apart. S/he criticises the causes of disintegration by speeding up the process. Sabotage is a natural response to the chaos ruling the world. Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary, passive nihilism is counter-revolutionary. And most people waltz tragi-comically between the two.

The nihilist makes one mistake: s/he does not realise that other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active historical factor.

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By K. Eliot

The concept of an autonomous class must be developed, as anarchist is as defunct as the rest of political terminology. Autonomy is not a label for a political group; it is a movement of ungovernable individuals against a world based on exploitation and the cheap pacifying trick of consumerism. The autonomists will resurrect ‘politics’ – the politics of class, the politics of sexuality, the politics of pleasure and of everyday life – on its own terms to use against hierarchical power. The weapons of the autonomists could include:-

Ridicule of the system we live under. People can stand being insulted or assaulted, but not being laughed at.

The raising of pleasure from forgotten memories, and a realisation of the supremacy of the individual within a community of individuals.

Violent insurrection of individuals against manifestations of the system, either alone or with others, for no other reason than they wish to do so for themselves and for no cause, party or ideology. Peaceful protest en masse never achieved anything – if you want peace, prepare for war!

Autonomist violence has no sex/sexuality, no age, no race, no colour, no obvious perpetrators, no wish to injure anyone (but those who uphold the system should expect no mercy) – it will be a real pleasure to see the courts burn, the business community panic and hierarchies tremble … what happens after that is anyone’s guess, but we will have had our bit of fun!

K.Eliot

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We must be prepared to take what is apt from anarchism, surrealism, the situationists, and anything else of use – and throw the rest on a bonfire of redundant ideas. There can be no more nihilists fitting into role models created by society – the ‘artist’, the eccentric, the apathetic youth, the suicide, the mass murderer, the recluse etc.

There is no ideology, because ideology always serves the ruling class.

Nihilism – Edited from IS 11, 1967 in Leaving the 20^th Century by Chris Gray (AntiClockWise #7)

Rosanov’s definition of nihilism is the best: The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn round … No more coats and no more homes.

Nihilism is born of the collapse of myth. Once myth no longer justifies the ways of power to men, the real possibilities of social action and experiment appear. Myth excuses social regression, but it also reinforces it. Its explosion frees an energy and creativity too long syphoned away from authentic experience into religious transcendence and abstraction.

Christianity neutered the explosive nihilism of certain gnostic sects, and improvised a new order from the remains. But the establishment of the bourgeois world made any new recuperation of nihilistic energy onto the plane of myth impossible. In place of a myth, the bourgeoisie can only produce ideologies. And because ideology is essentially a partial, technical rationality, it can never integrate the total negation of the nihilist. As a last ditch effort, Power has produced the spectacle of nihilism – on the principle that the more we contemplate, as spectators, the degradation of all values, the less likely we are to get on with a  little real destruction.

For the last century and a half the most striking contribution to art and life has been the fruit of free experiment with the possibilities of a bankrupt civilisation. The erotic reason of Sade; Kierkegaard’s sarcasm; Nietzsche’s lashing irony; Ahab’s blasphemy; Mallarme’s deadpan; Carroll’s fantasy; Dada’s negativism – these are the forces which have reached out to confront people with some of the dankness and acridity of decaying values.

The great propagators of nihilism lacked an essential weapon: the sense of historic reality, the sense of the reality of decay, erosion and fragmentation. Those who have made history in the period of bourgeois decline have lacked a sense of the total decomposition of social forms which nihilism announces.

What we need now is the conjunction of nihilism and historical consciousness. As long as the two fail to join forces, we shall have to endure the present empire of political and artistic hacks, all preaching the fragmentary, all working assiduously for the Big Sleep, and justifying themselves in the name of one order or another: the family, morality, culture, the space-race, the future of margarine … everyone is going to pass through nihilism. It is the bath. All that is left of the past or the future is the demand for the present – for a present which has still to be constructed. Today, the destructive and the constructive moments of history are slowly coming together. When the two meet, that will be total revolution. And revolution is the only wealth left in the affluent society.

A nihilist is someone who takes the distinction between living and surviving seriously. If living is impossible, why survive? Once you are in that void, everything breaks up. Past and future explode; the present is ground zero. And from ground zero there are only two ways out, two kinds of nihilism: active and passive.

The passive nihilist compromises with his own lucidity about the collapse of all values. He (sic) makes one last nihilistic gesture: throws dice to decide his cause and becomes its devoted slave, for Art’s sake, and for the sake of a little bread … Nothing is true, so a few gestures become hip. Joe Soap intellectuals, pataphysicians, crypto-fascists, aesthetes of the acte gratuity, mercenaries, Kim Philbys, pop-artists, psychedelic impresarios – bandwagon and after bandwagon works out its own version of the credo quia absurdum est: you don’t believe it , but you do it anyway; you get used to it and you even get to like it in the end. Passive nihilism is an overture to conformism.

The active nihilist does not intend to simply watch things fall apart. He intends to speed up the process. Sabotage is a natural response to the chaos ruling the world. Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary; passive nihilism is counter-revolutionary. And most people oscillate between the two. But circumstances inevitably end by drawing a line and people suddenly find themselves, once and for all, on one side or the other of the barricades.

Consumer society’s frantic need to manufacture new needs adroitly cashes in on the way-out, the bizarre and the shocking. Black humour and real agony turn up on Madison Avenue. Flirtation with non-conformism is an integral part of the prevailing values. Awareness of the decay of values has its role to play in sales strategy. There’s money to be made in decomposition. More and more pure rubbish is marketed. The figurine salt cellar of Kennedy, complete with ‘bullet holes’ through which to pour of the salt, for sale in the supermarket, should be enough to convince anyone, if there is anyone who still needs convincing, how easily a joke which would once have delighted Ravachol or Peter the Painter now merely helps to keep the market going.

Consciousness of decay reached its most explosive expression in Dada. Dada really did contain the seeds by which nihilism could have been surpassed; but it just left them to rot, along with the rest. The whole ambiguity of Surrealism, on the other hand, lies in the fact that it was an accurate critique made at the wrong moment. While its critique of the supercession aborted by dada was perfectly justified, when it in turn tried to surpass Dada, it did so without beginning again with Dada’s initial nihilism, without basing itself on Dada-anti-Dada, without seeing Dada historically. History was the nightmare from which the Surrealists never awoke: they were defenceless before the communist party; they were out of their depth with the Spanish Civil War. For all their yapping, they slunk after the official left like faithful dogs.

The Dadaists, working to cure themselves and their civilisation of its discontents – working in the last analysis far more coherently than Freud himself – built the first laboratory to revitalise everyday life. Their activity was far more radical than their theory. “The point was to work completely in the dark. We didn’t know where we were going”. The Dada group was a funnel sucking in all the trivia and pure rubbish cluttering up the world. Reappearing at the other end, everything was transformed. Though people and things stayed the same they took on totally new meanings.

The initial weakness of Dada lay in its extraordinary humility. Every morning, Tzara, clown with the gravity of a pope, is said to have repeated Descartes’s statement, “I’m not even interested in knowing whether anyone ever existed before me”. Yet this same Tzara was to end up a Stalinist, sneering at men like Ravachol, Bonnot and Makhno’s peasant army. If Dada broke up because it could not superseded itself, then the blame lies on the Dadaists themselves for having failed to search for the real historic occasions when such supercession becomes possible: the moments when the masses arise and seize their destiny in their own hands.

Nihilists – Extracts from letters from Elliot Cantsin and from a Liverpool correspondent. (AntiClockWise #15)

“I don’t like the term nihilism. In Kropotkin’s autobiography he describes what nihilism meant in Russia in his time, and it was pretty cool. It really just meant Bohemian. The nihilists hated Russian aristocratic society, just as I and many other contemporary alternative culture anarchists hate everything about commercial capitalist class society. But they didn’t hate EVERYTHING; they had values, they were aesthetes, revolutionary artists. The term nihilist became known in the West through Turgenev’s novel ‘Father and Sons’ in which he describes nihilists as he saw them. Now Turgenev himself was a classist aristocrat and, seeing the nihilists negate everything HE held dear, he took them at their word as being nihilists who negated everything and believed in nothing. This view of nihilism became very trendy. Here in the U.S. many right wing commercialists in the underground use nihilism as an excuse to mock us leftists who are foolishly idealistic to believe in something. In the U.S. believing in nothing is a way to justify living a life of commercialism. Here in Tinsel-land any excuse is good enough to justify a life of commercialism. The alternatives are usually living in the street, in prison or in a lunatic asylum. But I see you are the right kind of nihilist …”

From a Liverpool correspondent:

I call myself a nihilist because I have lost faith in the anarchist movement. I now realise, after my naïve flirtation with anarchism, that all politics, however ultra left, merely plays into the hands of a huge spectacular game. It is a safety valve to focus our justified anger on an agenda of single issues. Also, politics is so serious and every situation calls for a defined response that must correlate to all previous responses.

On the one hand there are po-faced class struggle anarchists whose good intentions are ruined by a desperate search to put the world to rights. Most of these people are now little more than another lefty marginal group, hopelessly devoid of spirit, creativity and new ideas. The Merseyside Anarchist ran an editorial for several issues declaring that anyone who did not agree with their syndicalist view of politics was not entitled to call themselves an anarchist. Okay, I thought, and rather than argue the toss with them and their ilk, I turned my back on it all. Hence, nihilist …

Then there are the green lifestyle anarchists who reject traditional political roles, but fall into the old trap of single issue concerns and drippy search for a personal nirvana conducted with a disgusting middle class liberalism – a luxury the proletariat cannot afford in its struggle to liberate themselves from the oppressive rigours of their everyday lives.

I now sit back and make up my own mind on things. A bad attitude, cynicism and ridicule are essential weapons in trying to get to grips with this society. There is no ideology. My revolution is nihilistic assault on everyday life, both politically and culturally.

I’m not quite sure what the one more effort is for nihilists to become revolutionaries, but it is fun finding out and meeting new people doing the same thing.

Oh no, a rant against nihilism by Paul Petard. (AntiClockWise #16)

It always amuses me when individuals adopt the label ‘nihilist’ and insist that they are totally against all forms of ideology and say they reject all politics. Of course, this is just a contradiction. Being rigidly against all forms of ideology is itself an ideology and being consciously against all politics is itself a political stance. Claiming to ‘reject politics; is dishonest as everybody has politics of one sort of another, whether or not they care to admit it. Even if it is just mindlessly sitting in front of the telly and not giving a damn about anything, that is a form of political response. Nobody is above politics or can reject politics or wash their hands of it. Whether bourgeois or proletarian, everybody lives in, or under, the domination of the capitalist political economy.

When the situationists said ‘Nihilists, one more effort if we are to be revolutionaries” they were not praising nihilism but criticising it. Nihilism and cynicism in themselves are inadequate as a response to alienation, they lead to a dead end, or even worse cause further alienation. Cynicism is very easily recuperated and turned into a weapon of the system. If everyday life is a miserable competitive rat race, well ‘”That’s life” and “Nothing can be done about it”. We have to go beyond just nihilist disillusionment with this present society and move towards a positive revolutionary alternative instead.

Everyday life is based on a consumerist illusion of individual free choice under the rule of the market. This manipulates us into seeing any problems we have as simply individual problems and it encourages us to struggle only individually in isolation. But there can be no isolated individual struggle against the misery of everyday life. There are no individual solutions to the problem of capitalist loneliness. Why? … because individual solutions are lonely solutions. So called ‘everyday life’ is not something freely chosen and reproduced just by individuals. ‘Everyday life’ is a product of the capitalist system and it is organised and reproduced by capitalist society as a whole, not at random by individuals. Therefore it needs an organised and collective response by us in order to change it. Individuality certainly exists and is very important, but collective action is also essential.

Now, I’m not trying to be a miserable lefty killjoy and say we should all go and join some party or support the trade unions or “Kick the Tories out!” I wouldn’t insult anyone by asking them to waste their time doing such rubbish. But rejecting organised political responses means dropping out. Or rather, it means dropping in … to the market: going wherever the market forces you while deluding yourself you are “making up your own mind” and “doing your own thing”. Proletarians have to come together and organise politically with a set of ideas if they are to effect any real change.

Nihilists are like the monster with the big suction nose in the film Yellow Submarine. They go round sucking everything up into nothing but eventually they go too far and suck themselves up. The problem with nihilism is that it just leads to a negative nothing when what we need is a positive something.

The Sauce of the Nihil: Feral Faun. (AntiClockWise #18)

The following is a response to the article in Issue 16 criticising the notion of ‘nihilism’. This article is part of a letter from Feral Faun, an American contact.

I think that Paul’s rant on nihilism is full of false conceptions which indicate that, whatever protests he might wish to make, Paul is a leftist. His claim that to be “rigidly” (a use of language on his part that is blatantly intended to enforce his perspective) anti-ideological is an ideology is as absurd as the claim by fundamentalist Christians that atheism is a religion, or the claim by absolutists that the statement “There are no absolutes” is an absolute. Paul has an ideology so he must assume everyone does to justify himself against the critiques of ideology.

Paul is also a strict dualist in terms of the question of politics – you are either political or apolitical. And, as he rightly suggests, being apolitical is a political stance simply because the passivity upholds the present system. But he totally ignores a third option – that of being actively anti-political, of choosing to actively seek the destruction of the polis itself. This is because the polis is, for Paul, a given, unquestionable, destined to always be there (he doesn’t explicitly say this, but it permeates his letter). Because Paul rejects nihilism even as a tool, because he rejects the possibility of opposing ideology, he makes himself incapable of questioning the given of the ideologies he has chosen. I will grant that an anti-political perspective is political in the same way as atheism is theological. Because a concept of god exists it is necessary to consciously oppose it. Because the polis exists, it is necessary to consciously oppose it.

Paul says that because capitalism is organised and systematic it requires an organised and collective response to change it. I’m not sure why he wants to change the capitalist system in the first place. It seems quite capable of changing itself constantly as it needs to. I want to destroy it, not change it. But there is a deeper absurdity in Paul’s perspective. To claim that you cure a disease by using some of its symptoms – or even partial causes – makes no sense. Since capitalism is organised, what is clearly necessary is an analysis of the relationship between capitalism, authority and organisation.

Historically, every successful revolutionary organisation has ended up recreating capitalism in one form or another. This has already led to radical critiques of revolutionary organisation, critiques which Paul’s simplistic dismissal indicates he is ignorant of. Granted, one can argue that in the midst of riots of related uprisings a king of spontaneous ‘organisation’ occurs, but that is clearly not what Paul means. He is talking about a planned out, collective response … but who is to do the planning and what is to be the role of the individual in this collectivity? The spontaneous ‘organisation’ that arises in riots is not a collective, it is a union of egoists (Stirner), a reaction of individuals to their immediate circumstances and their immediate desires moving them to act together for the moment because their desires coincide. They are unified not be an idea, nor by an organisation that defines their goals, but by the fact that, for the moment, acting together is the best way of creating what we want.

There is no question that radical unions, workers councils, political parties, peace groups and the like offer more guarantees than spontaneous uprisings, but all the guarantee is is the reform of capital, the continuation of the present system of social relationships in a somewhat more palatable mask. It is the spontaneous, temporary unities that can be seen in riots, in vandalism and related small-group acts of revolt and the like which offers the possibility of the destruction of capitalism and the opening up of possibilities to explore new ways of relating.

Paul is correct in saying that the statement “One more effort, nihilists, if you would be revolutionaries” was part of a critique the situationists made of nihilism, but I have reason to believe that Paul has never read the full context of that critique. It was the friendliest critique the situationists ever made of anyone. For one thing, the situationists knew that nihilism has no relation to cynicism. At its best, cynicism is the failure of nihilism, the inability of someone to fully and intelligently critique all social values. More often, it is simply the disappointment of a believer in social values when these values prove hollow. In a sense, cynicism can become the ‘passive nihilism’ that the istuationists talked of, a sinking into despair. But the situationists also mentioned ‘active nihilism’, the active questioning of every social value. The situationists considered this questioning essential , but not enough to be revolutionary. This questioning needs to lead to a reversal of perspective, according to the situationists, in which the individual, having rejected society’s perspective, is able to see what surrounds them from their own “radical subjectivity”, from their own passions and desires. For the situationists, only when such a reversal of perspective occurs does the possibility of the destruction of capital and the creation of new ways of relating occur.

Maybe it would be better to call active nihilists ‘iconoclasts’, but the point of the situationists remains the same: only a person who rejects all the social values we’ve been taught has the possibility of reversing perspective – they still have to make that “one more effort” that pulls them beyond mere rejection – but it is only active nihilists, not leftists, not Trotskyists, not Maoists, not anarchists, not ideologues of any sort, who may reach the point where they can transcend nihilism. I think it would be a mistake to view this process in an absolutely linear way (i.e. as one by one smashing each social value and then one day suddenly reversing perspective) but the situationists have made a valid analysis. Paul has not.

One quibble I have with the situationists is that they choose to say that the “one more effort” creates “revolutionaries”. This forces one to redefine and explain what they mean by “revolutionary”. There have been, and continue to be, all sorts of revolutionaries who have never reversed their perspective, who support revolution as part of an ideology. Where their revolutions have succeeded they have often created versions of capitalism uglier and more repressive than what had existed before. The person who has reversed perspective, liberating their radical subjectivity, essentially becomes not a revolutionary, but rather an intelligent, conscious egoist( in Stirner’s sense) for whom revolution is not a value in itself, but is a tool for  destroying what prevents the liberation of one’s desires. As an acquaintance of mine put it “Too many revolutionaries without a revolution; we need a revolution without revolutionaries”. Feral Faun, 1991

Nihilism: Replies to Feral Faun by Paul Petard and Matthew Fuller (AntiClockWise #20)

Below are two responses to an article in Issue 18 by Feral Faun, which in turn was a response to an article by Paul in Issue 16 criticising the concept of nihilism.

“I’d like to make points in reply to Feral Faun’s article ‘The sauce of the nihil’ in ACW No. 18.

1. When I wrote my short piece in ACW criticising nihilism I was aware it had quite a few shortcomings and it was likely to provoke a critical response. Feral faun’s article contained some good arguments. In particular it outlined the important difference between the despair of ‘passive nihilism’, that is much in evidence today, and the active nihilism explored by the situationists. But Feral spoils things by jumping to conclusions, accusing me unfairly of saying and implying things that I never said or implied at all. Feral insists I believe the polis is unquestionable despite me not saying or suggesting anything of the sort. Nowhere in my article did I say I want to “change capitalism”, nor did I reject the possibility of opposing ideology. What I was attempting to argue was that “opposing ideology” is not as simple and straightforward as labelling oneself a “nihilist”, individually adopting a bohemian lifestyle or mentality and then imagining oneself to be outside the social system and the political economy that reproduced ideology. At the moment nobody is outside the capitalist political economy.

2. Feral seems to be well into Stirnerite egoism. Now I myself am a bit of a fan of ‘St. Max’ and his bible (“The Ego and its Own”), Stirner does a brilliantly entertaining demolition job on everything from divinity, to liberal humanism, to nationalism and even communism, but we should not end up turning Max into an idol! Sadly, Stirner’s egoism contains many flaws. Stirner leaves himself wide open to being distorted and used as an excuse for ‘free market’ capitalism which imposes an extreme atomisation and lonely separation between human individuals, suppressing the social side of human existence. A lot of what Stirner says is really not much more than a series of truisms that can be used to rationalise everything and anything from riding your bike the wrong way down a one way street to being a boss or dictator! Stirner fails to take account of the possibility that egoists, starting from their own egoistic motives, might end up freely choosing to behave in a communal and altruistic manner towards each other. And they might do so in a much deeper and complex way than just a temporary opportunist ‘union of egos’. He also does not pay enough attention to the fact that social and altruistic influences and forces might be an inherent part of one’s own ego. If you can have a ‘union of egos’ then you can also have a communion of egos. Indeed, why not go further and end up with a … communism of egos?!! The only real egoists in the world are hermits. And anyway if Stirner was such a mean selfish antisocial egoistic sod why did he write all his ideas down in a nice book so we could all have the pleasure of reading it? Maybe he wasn’t such a hard fellow after all.

3. It is just anarcho prejudice to assume spontaneous organisation must always be better than formal organisation. The two things don’t have to be opposites; they can complement each other in a situation. In a riot, for instance, we may start off spontaneously invading a building. We might then decide to plan a rota, temporarily delegating tasks such as lookout and food supply to certain individuals. On the other hand, if we don’t do this, we might just spontaneously go hungry and get arrested by the police hiding round the corner! There have been certain moments in history when the creation of organisational forms such as workers councils have made a valid contribution to insurrectionary situations. At the moment nearly all formal revolutionary organisations are a joke, but that is very much to do with the specific situation we are now in in the 1990s. It is not automatically always the case.” Paul.

Matthew Fuller’s piece:

“What a cosy, nicely personalised way of adapting to capitalist society claiming the rejection of all values is. After all, you can’t be proved wrong can you? If I say that I want to destroy capitalist society, but not society as such, is that just because I’m thick? (One social value I don’t want to get round to destroying is talking over ideas like this in order to get to a different position). I wouldn’t mind knowing how just how someone who has destroyed all social values is supposed to get on with people they meet in the street; are they allowed to have mates? Claiming a pure intransigent relationship to society owes more to the tradition of avant-garde art or the political vanguard in its despising of those who can’t quite get round to destroying all those distastefully common social values. I know Feral doesn’t actually hold the ideas of those who’ve got all the right ideas (don’t they just know it) but the idea that you can individually supersede capitalist relations is a con. A con revealed in the polluted air you breathe and the food produced by wage labour that you eat.

Radical subjectivity needs to be supplemented by a collective subjectivity. Not a collective in the sense of the ‘right-on collective, man’ way of making capitalist relations just that little less intolerable, but the unties that Feral hints at in riots and other group acts of revolts and unities that form us as part of an ecology, a class or whatever.

These unities extend, in my experience, far further than Feral dares to believe and need to be extended, sustained. They extend further than the spasmodic tremor of riots in friendships; friendship that I know I can rely on for my transgressions of decency, friendships that transgress property and friendships that go beyond the idea of the sovereign individual that feral relies on so much in order to avoid being swamped, perhaps swamped by capitalist relations, or perhaps being swamped by something a little more enjoyable. And not just in friendships - with people I don’t even know. The knowledge that millions of us had the government right over the barrel on the Poll Tax (yes, just to bring in another one and, no, it wasn’t a complete defeat for the powerful or a revolution without revolutionaries) still gave me a sense of our power, our resistance that makes me go on and do more. And it is this relationship, the me and the us, me as part of us, that makes movement possible, that puts a sustained destruction of social relations with a price on everything well within our grasp.

Feral’s argument that every “successful” revolutionary organisation has ended up recreating capitalism and that therefore organisation is a no-no looks a bit shaky too when compared with the later assertion that it is in riots and other temporary forms of subversion that freedom is found. What happens after a riot, according to Feral’s formula? Possibilities are opened up to explore new ways of relating, but the cops still come back. Capitalism reasserts itself, if not in the hearts of rioters, in the terrain of the riot.  So what does this show? Not much, just that everything is in continual movement, depending on the antagonistic development of powers, of individuals and groups positioned in relationship to each other. Feral’s demand that revolutions remain in a static position, the position of their inception, a fleeting moment, denies the versatility of those that make them and actually gives some kind of awesome magic power to those poised to defeat them. Not daring to extend our power for fear of the unknown reduces the possible to a radically phrased Time and Motion study that is content with nothing but the most miniscule. What Feral realises however is that however temporary, a displacement of restraint with freedom is still a taste. Why the attempt to extend this infinity of freedom suddenly becomes kind of ungroovy is a bit of a mystery.

It is this freedom that we need and that we embody in our destruction of power relations. But what do we all it? Ideology? Being revolutionary or what? Feral gives some hint of this when writing that the organisation needed is “… a reaction of individuals to their immediate circumstances moving them to act together when their ideas coincide”. These immediate circumstances might well be the need to take over housing or organising the production and distribution of food – spontaneous reactions that can become long term and still not lose their necessity and vitality. How they come around to the understanding that their desires do indeed lead them in the same direction implies some kind of theoretical common ground in which to negotiate this unity. (Theoretical in the sense that “theory” is when you have ideas, “ideology” is when ideas have you). A common ground implies a relationship that already forms some kind of counter power to those of the dominant forces in society. These common grounds are where ideas and relationships are formed in antagonism to those which the powerful attempt to enforce. To deny this is to assign to power a near or complete control over us. To allow even theoretically the powerful such immense influence is to accept for ever the role of the marginalised. It’s a heroic pose but a waste of time. We are the ones whose productivity keeps the parasites in place and it is when we forget our strength, or pretend to minimalise it,  that they begin to win.” Matthew Fuller

Situationist International - Guardian article by Jack Shamash c.1990

Another Cheap Holiday in Other People’s Misery?

“I Don’t Want a Holiday in the Sun”

The holiday season is here again, time to pack your bags and head off to the Lake District, Spain or India etc. Most people will say they go on holiday to “get away from it all” for a while. This simple and innocent enough statement is a major indictment of society. People happily admitting that their lives are so poor that they need a fortnight break from it, rather than making better by revolting against the conditions that make it necessary to get away from. Bizarrely, many people will work extra hard and add more drudgery to 50 weeks just so they can have 2 weeks away from their everyday surroundings.

And what do we do with these 2 weeks that we have sacrificed ourselves for over the rest of the year? Either we just sit on a beach soaking up the melanoma inducing sun just to look brown and glamorous for a couple of days back in dear old Blighty, or we got to gawp at some other poor sods in a faraway place.

Some of the former is slightly more obnoxious. Xenophobic cretins lambast foreigners all year round and then spend their ‘free’ time on foreign soil. The modern package holiday is simply another commodity and a tool to pacify restless and frustrated proletarians, to give us fools a goal, something to look forward to instead of striving to MAKE EVERY DAY A HOLIDAY.

Glamour has created the image of the bronzed god or goddess; we envy the golden brown returned tripper as particularly beautiful. But, of course, it is a fleeting vanity as the tan vanishes – Ha! Watch your year’s savings pale before your very eyes! Imagine the effect if we were neither jealous nor complimentary, but just apathetic to their skin deep commodity.

Thousands of people packed like sardines on golden beaches, exactly the same as they are on their way to work and shopping, but the weather is a bit better. The really hip people pay a bit extra for quieter beaches in more exclusive places to do exactly the same thing … except there are not as many people to cop off with. Desperate people desperately doing desperate things in a desperate desperation to get drunk, laid and broke. Why do we frantically cram ‘pleasurable’ things into a frenzied 14 days when there is all the time in the world to have fun.

More ‘refined’ people get to more ‘exotic’ locations to soak up the culture and different lifestyles. In Europe, and increasingly beyond this, there is no difference in lifestyle. A grim semblance of uniformity is gripping Europe. My goodness, even the Commies get the vote and have MacDonald’s now. All these jaunts are mere trips made by alienated souls staring at other alienated souls, reflecting each other’s total submission to the totality of sameness and the dominant, global culture.

The constant and frantic need for something new drives more people further afield for a holiday ‘away from it all’. Societies with a bit more spirit and life than ours are turned into spectacles by the all-consuming system of TOURISM. Tourism has the entire world and everything in its scope; the gift of ‘choice’ as to which part we want to see makes it more attractive, when it is a mere subsidiary of the supermarket of ideologies. One travel agent proudly proclaimed “WHEREVER YOU’RE BOUND, WE’RE BOUND TO HAVE BEEN.” Whoopee!

Holidays for the proletariat are generally a product of the industrial and post-industrial eras. They are one justification for the continuance of wage slavery. These justifications are now so subtle, charming and all-embracing that few question their role and even fewer do anything about it. The easy and more attractive option is to take the bribes, ignore the contradictions and keep your head down.

A rather strange phenomenon is how many people return to the safety of their everyday routine with “It was nice to go away, but it’s nicer to come home” as if we are afraid of having a good time and of breaking the very routine we got away from in the first place … for too long, anyway.

The anarchist to their credit say that they do not want to spend time lecturing the working class about how wronged they are because the proletariat already know that things are bad. However, I am increasingly sceptical of this because the dominant society has hypnotised people with satellite TV, mass culture (or high culture for the more ‘enlightened’), higher material standards of living, the right to buy your own council house, more and more useless accessible commodities, and the reward of a holiday from your hard earned wages.

And if you rebel or step out of line? Well, there’s another trip ‘away from it all’ … to prison.

So, this year, another cheap holiday in other people’s misery? Probably, but send me a postcard anyway!

AntiClockWise #16

A few further thought

The terrorist attack on the beach in Tunisia had me thinking of this article again. Our choice of holiday destinations has dramatically increased and I have wondered about how much affluent tourists really appreciate the culture and the people they are visiting. It all seems fine to visit Egypt and Tunisia on holidays that are cheaper than going on holiday in the UK, but when it goes wrong everyone throws their hands in the air in horror. Few people consider the geopolitical situation of the country they are going on holiday to and perhaps they ought to when they are paying for their cheap holiday.

We seem to insist on our right to go anywhere and act in any way we like, but accept no responsibility that the place we are going is very different from our own everyday life and there may be people who are not exactly chuffed to see us sizzling half naked and drunken on their homeland. As we visit more places, many of us end up in places that are not as peaceful as Cornwall or the Costa del Sol and, increasingly, terrorist attacks claim British and other western victims in Africa, South-East Asia and beyond.

When the original piece above was written, the former Yugoslavia was in a state of brutal civil war, yet it is now open to a global audience of holiday makers, and many other places are now open for the discerning consumer to travel to. Almost the whole world is now there to be cherry picked for tourism and the relative cost of travel has fallen for many people to join in the tourist industry. Even formerly ‘closed’ nations such as China have opened to allow their citizens to join in this capitalist free for all.

It is argued that many places depend on tourism to thrive, but I question this as they seemed to be doing perfectly well before global culture embraced their own community. As spectacular capitalism envelopes the world, traditional cultures become side shows. Soon, the whole world will be a safe clinical monochrome place where every city is the same (just as the high streets of most towns in England have), so you could never actually know where you are without being told. Only the natural world will differentiate one place from another, and tourism will soon render that less unique. One example is Tibet, which has become the holiday destination of choice for the burgeoning Chinese middle class and where the Tibetan culture has only been allowed to continue if it is a sanitised product to be consumed by the new visitors from a country which has occupied their land for 60 years.

People do still work hard for their holidays rather than striving to make every day a holiday.  I have met very few people who have really had their minds expanded by travel. Overseas travel is often now a matter of ticking places off on the map rather than learning anything significant from visiting more places.

I also wonder how people are often different on holiday than they are in their everyday lives. This ‘actor’ role is fascinating – which is the real person? Increasingly, we have to judge people not on their background or what they have done, but where they have been. And does this travel and holiday tourism make anyone really happier? One incident that struck me particularly strongly was of the beach in Italy where sunbathers continued their holiday while sharing the sands with the corpses of drowned migrants who had lost their lives in a desperate flight for a better life.

Of course, the original article barely touched on the impact of tourism on the environment. The number of aircraft and air journeys has exploded (perhaps a poor choice of words!). Mass tourism demands more flights and car journeys, more hotels and facilities to be built in often fragile environments, more roads to be built, shifts in population to service tourism rather than traditional occupations. Travel is not an adventure, it is just a sequence of consuming goods and images.

Spectacular commodity society has reveled in tourism, with yet more opportunities to sell products and services from insurance to baggage to sports equipment to travel toiletries etc. We are now encouraged to take more than one holiday a year to increase the allure of relaxation and keep us working harder. As capitalism is desperate to find new ways for us to spend more products and consume more images, we also think we have to play this game and in turn become desperate to either fit in more trips and/or find more exotic places to visit.

We rarely stop to think about the cost of tourism, apart from what we have paid in money for it. The locations reduced to being tagged as tourist destination are also the home of people like us, places where they have lived for centuries or millennia.  Of course, increasingly, the formerly poor of the world may in the future be able to come here and gawp at us on their holidays, which would be deliciously ironic if it wasn’t exactly what spectacular society wants.

Communique #6: TIME - Pieces from AntiClockWise on Time

RANT - Time is the Enemy; Pleasure is the Aim

There are only two kinds of time in life: production time and consumption time. The concept of time plays an incarcerating role in all our existences, from the present to the past, in the form of history.

Politicos continually harp on about past glories and even defeats. John McQuarrie declared, “This dwelling in the past has, like other cases, various ways in which is manifests itself. Always, however, it is typical of the man who, in common parlance, has no will of his own – the irresolute man, the man of bad faith, the scattered man”.

The nihilist militants must fight in a battleground of the present, unshackled by the weight of history. The history of the socialist movement is ultimately depressing, a catalogue of individual self-sacrifice. By looking forward, we can win, shattering the con that passes as civilisation. We only have to be lucky once and we have cracked it.

However, that is not to say that we should not heed the lessons of the past, rather that necrophilia is a pretty dead end occupation. Time does give us important lessons. Time is irreversible; the present is unique and does not repeat itself. Time cannot be revisited, like a place. Living in the past is relying on memory and memory is fallible. There is never forever, only the moment.

Time (past, present or future, and productive or consumerist) is a symbol of stability. It explains stability i.e. if the nature of the world was to change tomorrow then humans would seek elements of sameness in it and observe these events with clocks.

TIME IS A DICTATOR. TIME IS A TYRANT

‘Free time’ is consumption time; work is production time. Work is dictated by clocks: the established tradition of the rigours of 9-5, despite the fact that these are the best hours of the day, a time when we should be laughing and playing in the sun and the rain. The reformist illusion is a shameful con, merely adjusting the proportions of consumer and production time. ‘Free time’ is given to older pupils in schools as a carrot to pacify their naturally restless spirit.

Humans and time need to be considered in tandem – time is not a natural phenomenon; it exists as a social control and is a subtle, if omnipresent, element of spectacular oppression.

Time, stripped to its basics, is only a dimension. It is not substantial and so cannot be just smashed, but has to be psychologically overcome. Time constrains our actions, but it must be reiterated that it is merely a ploy. Sartre once said that the time of personal experience is part imagination and part fact.

Our lives are not only dictated by timetables and clocks, but also by our inner clocks. It is not time that is complex but human relations with time. Even depression has daily and seasonal fluctuations.

Perhaps the strangest thing about time is the importance placed on the week, the working week etc. But a striking feature of the origins of our modern 7 day week is the failure to trace it to any lunar cycle or any geo-physical time patterns. In the entire ancient world only the Jewish week was 7 days long. Eviatar Zerubavel stated “The disassociation of the 7 day week from nature has been one of the most significant contributions of Judaism to civilisation”. Like the invention of the mechanical clock some 1500 years later, it facilitated the establishment of what Lewis Mumford identified as “mechanical periodicity”. Hence, the distance between human beings’ lifestyle and nature is increasing.

Time and space seem less rigid and less well organised in dreams, so that perhaps we should return to the slogan, “Take your dreams for reality”.

An awareness of the role of time in dictating our lives (including our resistance) within the context of the illusion that passes for reality is an important first step in challenging the total oppression of the dominant society.

AntiClockWise #14.

Time Zone – Ian, Sheffield

The following are some more thoughts on the subject of time as discussed in #14 of AntiClockWise:

“Time, stripped to its basics, is just a dimension” … but, in the modern cultures of today, time achieves some kind of hyper-real status or monolithic presence. TIME AND ALIENATION. We see the packaging of time as some kind of tool for each individual to help blank out the overbearing alienation of their own lives in society, and this time is used ultimately to support the mass alienation of society by detracting the problems from each individual.

Time is your measure of certainty and safety. The knowledge that your movement is predetermined by yourself, that you will be at a certain place at a certain time to do a certain task. Total order. You set times using a mental model that tells you how to act out each process and where you need to be so that your dependence on, and communication with, strangers is cut down to nothing. Time is your defence for having to communicate with a world that is necessarily portrayed as hostile. All that remains is the safe haven of your destination (whether a mental or physical one). Job done.

For a convoluted anti version of this sad model, check out the film After Hours – here, the concept of time as a guide for security is turned on its head, with glimpses of pleasure being alliterated by an overbearing nightmarish feeling. We must question why the beauty of spontaneity – the opposite of complete timetabling – is either controlled or totally eliminated in our lives.

The natural progression from using time in this way is to ‘competition for time’, where times planned in future coincide for two or more individuals or bodies. This enforces more discipline on how you should regulate your time, and your control over your life is slowly to be eroded, to be replaced by further seemingly irreversible alienation.

The pleasure invoked from coincidence is replaced by feelings of anger and frustration (to see a vision of time out of context, of coincidences and freedoms you need only look at the fiction of Thomas Pynchon or Paul Auster). The prime exponents of such devious theories on time are the ruling classes and the bosses … the real TIME BANDITS.

In modern society, the phrase of work being a ‘prison of measured time’ could not ring more true. 9-5 is their time, but what about the rest of the day? You have a choice to either submit to the comforts of passive consumption, to scramble after the products of your own labour in ‘their’ time and so 9-5 becomes their time when you fuel their capitalist system through consuming. Or, you can look beyond … to pursue your own desires under the constriction of these hours allotted to you. But this is the true prison of measured time, the worst type of prison when you have an illusory freedom … but, in reality, only the contractual regulation of turning up at 9am to give them your time. And so, you proceed to divide the 9-5 such that an optimum amount of time can be spent on a maximum amount of activities. But optimisation and maximisation are products of their thinking, of their hold over time, until eventually these free time activities become duties and ultimately your whole time is their time. By thinking in these ways it is impossible to win and eventually control is complete.

TIME IS THE ENEMY, PLEASURE IS THE AIM. By using pleasure as a true guide for time, the concept of ‘their time’ can be smashed. The empty vacuum of alienation, supported by complex social behaviour, can only be destroyed when people negate the precise timetabling of all things considered constructive. From this, time can be reclaimed and be

free to each individual … pleasure will override. As the original article stated, an awareness of the conceived roles of time must be gained before nihilists can shake the foundations of a hilarious society and Democracy.

Another viewpoint on Time came in a letter from American correspondent Elliot Cantsin.

“Time is just a word that labels something that seems somehow real. Even the clock and the week of seven, rather than six of eight, days are just measurements that might be useful. It’s not TIME that is evil, it’s the system that puts a dollar value on your time by the hour and uses a punch clock as an excuse to dump you out of bed in the morning in order to rush with a herd of zombies to a dreary place in which you are forced to spend a life of meaningless drudgery. You don’t need to be an existential analysis of time to see this”.

Time to Clock Off! (Editorial of AntiClockWise #1)

·         Do you feel like your everyday actions are controlled by the clock on the wall?

·         Is your job at set hours? Why are most jobs 9-5 when there is no particular reason why it should be those hours: in fact, these are the brightest parts of the day?

·         How many times do you look at your watch every day?

·         Do you feel lost without a watch or a clock to look at?

·         Are you afraid of missing your favourite soap opera if you don’t keep check of the time?

·         When you are making love, how often do you fail to relax because of other commitments at specific times?

·         Why do football matches last exactly 90 minutes, and why are Stockport County always a goal down after 90 minutes?

·         Why is that when we want to travel from A to B, it is dictated by rigid timetables that we panic over but are rarely adhered to?

·         Why do watches have hands and hands have watches?

·         Could it be that time is the supreme form of social control, where even our resistance is timetabled. Our lives are run on a timetable – who the hell created it all?

We should have our own ideas of time and motion. Pleasure is timeless; motion should be at our pace.