POSTCARDS from nowhere

LITERATURE | THEORY | IDEOLOGY

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, & at liberty when he wrote of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet & of the Devil’s party without knowing it. (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell)

Theory begins in action, in a direct engagement!

If, as von Moltke once said, no plan survives first contact with the enemy, it is precisely at such a point of contact – between ideology & literature – that theory is born. This is not to attribute any kind of privileged situation to theory, rather the contrary: the encounter that appears to take place here is the mark of a hegemonic regime asserting its “right” against an other from which every positive status has been stripped. Theory begins in humiliation. Yet the assertions of power give rise, despite themselves, to perturbatory effects: either power, in order to “totalise itself,” puts its very meaning at stake, in a “proof of arms,” or risks being a sham. Belonging to the theatre of ideology costumed as “action,” such assertions are a sham in any case. Power is always a matter of fact; of a prevalence of a system of meaning. Stripped of the possibility to mean, its other ought not to exist: a contradiction, a paradox. Yet this encounter with the enemy is not an encounter with a mere “antithesis,” one among others, to be sublimated within an irresistible dialectic, but an encounter with the antithetical as such. To take von Moltke’s maxim further: if the masterplan falters at first contact, this is because its principal raison d’être is to represent what it already knows, since it alone affirms the sovereign domain of meaning & retains its unique prestige only so far as the true “enemy” remains excluded from the field. The task of all hegemonic regimes is thus, in effect, to become the enemy, to – as it were – usurp the enemy’s place, or rather non-place: to re-inscribe the “figure” of the antithetical within its own dialectical schema – such that the faltering-on-first-contact is recast as nothing more than an etiquette of the ritual of sublimation. Such etiquettes are the very foundation of ideological “truth,” inevitably eliding with an ideology of truth. That a political “fiction” supported by force should demand a monopoly over the field of meaning is perhaps trivial. That it should do so by the suppression of “fiction as such,” is worthy of consideration. This, of course, has been the fundamental alignment of reason in western thought since at least Plato, polarised between ideologies of truth, on the one side, & literature on the other. Theory, of more recent provenance, emerges from a deconstruction of this classical schema & the entire edifice of reason built upon it. It begins with questions about the “point of (non) contact” between ideology & its other. It begins with a question about the “literariness” of this discourse of reason & the “rhetorical” nature of its self-address. We have every reason to suppose, then, that this particular constellation of terms – literature, theory, ideology – is of an order other than the purely “arbitrary.” In constellation, these terms point to something like a critical condition of thought: an emergence, a crisis. This constellation resembles something like a Borromean knot. Just as the Platonic schema describes, not an ideological symptom (one among others), but a universal symptomatology, so the Lacanian triad comprising the Borromean knot – real, symbolic, imaginary – is topologically arranged in such a fashion that, while none directly intersect, nor can any one be separated without the others also separating.[1] This knot comprises the (w)hole of the subject, just as the constellation literature-theory-ideology might be said to comprise the (w)hole of the semantic field in all its paradox. To paraphrase Foucault, perhaps one day this constellation will be seen as decisive for meaning in general as the experience of contradiction was for dialectical thought: but in spite of so many auguries to this effect, the language in which this constellation will find its space & the illumination of its being lies almost entirely in the future.[2]

LANGUAGES OF THE UNSPEAKABLE

the moment of true poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play (Guy Debord)

The Alienist tract “Poetry & Crime”¹ opens with the observation that “Poetry is suppressed wherever it represents a threat to the rationale of social order.” It is easy to imagine that such a statement can only apply to those totalitarian states where “poetry” represents a threat to the prestige of the governing regime, as (under various conditions) it did during the Soviet era. Here “the force of poetry is in direct proportion to its illegality.” In the socalled “Free World,” the identification of poetry & crime is, by contrast, predominantly an affectation, inherited from modernist Rimbaud outsider-posturing that found its most impactful manifestation in rock-n-roll, punk, hiphop, noise. The idea that FBI agents actively infiltrate & subvert “poetry” circles in the US would, on the surface, appear ludicrous.

ANTIMANIFEST()

Alienism isn’t an idea, but the repudiation of an empty premise.

WISH YOU WERE HERE #ALIENISM

MORE POSTCARDS FROM DYSTOPIA…

DRECK

“all desire flows from a relation to power”

DRECK, Interior Ministry (2022), 48 pages, PDF

A SMALL POETICS OF INSURRECTION

“A dialectical poetics of radical history that asks what kind of resistance & poetry are possible under conditions of capitalist repression, if we do not simply want to return to everyday life? Synthesizing documentary poetics (the lives of George Jackson, Luxemburg, Verlaine, Pasolini, Anna Mendelssohn, Dalton, Vallejo, & others) with the capitalist alchemy of surveillance & repression, [A SMALL POETICS OF INSURRECTION] tracks the processes with which those in power react to the social struggles of political movements & the works of revolutionary poets, who strike back into a corner & contribute to our understanding of social upheavals, illuminated by the solar flares of Marx & Rimbaud.” (Tripwire)

SYNTAGMA

Grublike bodies flinched under overripe robes as I passed through the flocks of faithful. They did not see me. They could not because you had decreed that I do not exist. You made the manifest light and easy to bear. We only had to love you. So I believe.

ALIENIST STREET THEATRE

#OPERATION LUKASHENKO

4 besieging actions for MINSK INDEPENDENCE PALACE

MARTIAN

A catalogue of devices for manipulating a fugal moment

I will avenge them, one day. Signal further misadventures with woad-painted warriors from the distant past, a workaday story of lovelessness. There was even a plot to send a posse of stout Englishmen to kidnap the composer and drag him back to London, ‘where he fucking belonged’. The simplicity of this piece gives the performer the opportunity to express her own sense of estrangement: a turning off, a change of direction away from an origin. In the eighteenth century I was mostly figurative. Origin is painstaking misapplication.

ALIENIST 10

DEATH BY MONOCULTURE / 4 PRINCIPLES OF ALIENIST THEATRE / HERETICAL RUMINATIONS / HYPOTEXT / ENTROPOPHAGY / THE POSSESSIONS / THE END / THE GREAT SUICIDE ORGIES / NOTES ON THE EVENT / DEATH MACHINES / NO STRATEGY / SANDFACE / MAELSTROM / CYBORG / MARTIAN / AMERIKAN ATAVISM / INTERPLANETARY REPRODUCTION / MATERIAL CATALOGUE / PUTIN’S CUNT

4 PRINCIPLES OF ALIENIST THEATRE

1. Alienation is the underlying condition of human existence;