Nyx a noctournal

issue 5

MYTH

 2011 Nyx, a noctournal All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Nyx, a noctournal Editorial Board.
2

editorial

return to myth is timely. And yet what other direction can we turn? Our lives are like so many myths to hand. Myth begins as a form of storytelling: stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about others; in the way we reconstruct our personal memories and reason out our drives. What are we assuming? For it is something all too disquieting, as our contributions here attest. Myth is both the primitive narrative of the ancients and the ignorant, and the other-space of every story, where truth disappears into speculation, misinformation and whispers. It is into this grey space we enter. Myths of the near future dominate our era. Shock doctrines, states of exception, the Big Society, 9/11, the neoliberal faith in liberated markets. Even the future itself has become a myth we sacrifice ourselves to, be it through precarious labour, or the Left's stagnation into the impasse of Communism and tax evasion. We begin with two riddles: is our Western notion of happiness a myth, or is myth the basis for our happiness? The city pulses now, enchanted by broken glass, the spectacle of its own wound, the scent of beer and burnt plastic against a manic grime beat. New myths reveal themselves within these cracks: student violence, Left-wing propaganda machines and false prophets attempting to take the power back. Follow us as riot season blooms under a tense 2013 heat wave in Laura Oldfield Ford's visions, where we end up in Deptford in a parable of prescription drugs and disappearance acts. Someone must have been telling lies about you and I or were they just myths, nothing more? in the representations of our culture in the blue chatter of TV sets in nocturnal bedsits. Perhaps a Pepsi Max masculinity of male conquest and infantilised hedonism? The entirety of our lives are privatised and a certain callousness develops, as we begin to defiantly accept the negative words we once jabbed ourselves with. As the public is fed to carnivorous capitalists, we read the future in chicken bones before paralysis restricts what we came for. But no! Myth also offers a way out of the fatalism and increasing depression of cultural and economic cutbacks. Metamorphosis maybe, or perhaps we are all Luther Blissetts now. Two cowboys swagger through the West to shoot down dead the Big Society. Bang bang! These are mythic times we move through.

Nyx , a noctournal
Nyx is

Fifth Issue Myth

Joanna Figiel Dan Taylor Nicholas E. Gledhill Claudia Firth Kerry Gilfillan Adam Hutchings David Ridley Sinikka Heden Sarah Harman

Buy

Student shop, RHB, Goldsmiths, London Check website for other locations

Thanks to

The Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University for London, for continued support

Contributors

Layout

Lara Choksey Riddle Grave Sylvain Popinjay Laura Oldfield Ford Theodore Reeves-Evison Izabela Lyra Julia Scheele Amedeo Policante Luther Blissett Alice White Richard Hamilton Andrew Blundell

Sinikka Heden

Cover Image

Theodore Reeves-Evison

Contribute Read

noctournal@gmail.com

www.nyxnoctournal.com noctournal.posterous.com www.issuu.com/noctournal

4

index

Destination: Happiness
Sinikka Heden

6 12 18 23 24 30 36 40 48 56 58 60 64

Mythe de la mythe
Adam Hutchings

Student Violence
Lara Choksey Claudia Firth Izabela Lyra

Amedeo Policante

What we came for Coalition of the Willing Take the Power Back 2013
Laura Oldfield Ford

Learning how to Disappear

Dan Taylor

Pepsi Max Manhood

Nicholas E. Gledhill

Chicken Bones

Richard Hamilton

Stages of Metamorphosis
Theodore Reeves-Evison Luther Blissett

Luther Blissett: Mythmaker Big Society: A Western

Riddle Grave & Sylvain Popinjay
5

HAPPINESS

DESTINATION:

- a western myth?

by SINIKKA HEDEN

In the West, each successive generation has tried to conquer happiness anew by making a revolution of some kind, whether out of generosity or ingeniousness - Franois Jullien

omewhere, Sophia Coppolas latest movie, ends in the middle of a highway. The main character, Johnny Marco, a jaded Hollywood actor is walking aimlessly into the distance, away from his black Ferrari. Even if happiness remains un-discussed throughout the film, the story we have just seen has eliminated the decaying myth that money, success and fame will make you happy. A large body of research into the question of happiness has emerged in recent years across many fields. Even economists have started to measure the welfare of countries according to their happiness index rather than GDP. This fascination might be down to the fact that Western living standards and material wealth have improved significantly since the 1950s, when the first surveys measuring our levels of happiness were carried out, yet we are told that we are now unhappier and more depressed than ever.This discovery leads us to the conclusion that there must be other, more complex answers to the question of what makes us happy and how to achieve it. Here, I would argue that this endeavour is potentially dangerous; happiness is essentially an abstract feeling and therefore impossible to recognize, hence it cannot be measured. Yet, if we are presumably moving away from the myth of material happiness, then what are our new beliefs and assumptions of what it means to a Western society? In Vital Nourishment, Departing from Happiness, Franois Jullien observes that there is a fixation on happiness in the West. More than that, he argues that we are too obsessed with achieving various goals, and that our lives are driven by finality an idea that directly opposes Chinese thinking, which his argument is greatly based upon (2007:3). Instead, Jullien brings our attention to the process, and the appealing

idea of floating into life. Instead of thinking of happiness in terms of destination, he suggests free evolution, where life itself decides where it wants to go. These ideas are easy to grasp metaphorically; we should be like fish that go among instead of going toward (2007:109). Or think of happiness as love it comes most easily when you least expect it and when it comes you just know, without being able to describe it.Yet, love comes and goes. It is not fixed or certain, and if we cling onto it, we risk choking it. Jullien points out that the appeal of happiness, dissolves under the focus on finality and that when we cling onto things such as goals, it becomes unattainable because it is always pushed farther into the distance, or becomes unbearable, simply because grasping it destroys its value as an end still capable of inspiring desire (2007:113). This can be further illustrated by the glass that is always half-empty; an idea that seems to define our time we live in a culture where we can always do better, look better, live better essentially be better human beings. It appears that the myth of happiness has become this desperate search for an imaginary happiness utopia and societys seducing promise that we can all get there on the condition that we work hard on various aspects of life: our (positive) attitudes, health, spirituality, and so on. Yet, how did we in the West acquire such believes? From a young age we are taught that achieving set goals will make us fulfilled and happy people; from the dream job and a beautiful home to finding the one. The Happy ending is a myth that pop-culture has enforced upon us since taking our first steps, beginning with something like Disneys adoption of Cinderella. Since then, everywhere you turn there is someone telling you how to improve Your Life, in
7

we live in a culture where we can always do better, look better, live better essentially be better human beings

order to increase Your Level of Happiness. Recent national campaigns promise just that: The Guardian recently added a section to its website called Start Happy. Furthermore, Action for Happiness are an organisation that describe themselves as a new movement for social change, and whose lectures cover topics such as why happiness matters and why we need to reconsider our goals in life. Their answer to reaching happiness in an increasingly selfish society lies in caring for others. The new iPhone app Mappiness, alerts you everyday to ask how you are feeling and where you feel happiest and with whom. The list goes on. Business has quickly realized that the last thing that money cannot buy is conserved happiness. Instead, what we can buy are revealed secrets and methods that come in the shape of expert advice in a sea of magazines, newspaper weekend supplements and, most distinctively, in the
8

ever-expanding genre of self-help literature. The international bestseller The Secret (2006) might be the most mythical selfhelp book of all. In sum, the book offers a method for a happy and successful life. Firstly you need to envision your dreams and goals, and secondly believe in them strongly and passionately enough: this is the secret that will make them come true. With such an approach, it means that the responsibility is now put on the individual. If things go badly in life it must be your own fault you cannot have wanted it enough, or have tried hard enough. This trapped situation has turned us into eager researchers, looking for quick fixes in the same way as dieters might use fad-diets in a belief that they will help them to lose weight. The vital difference here is that losing weight is a tangible, practical goal. By contrast self-help literature promises a special knowledge, or way of thinking: unquantifiable goals based as much on a

Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger of exhaustion. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger [of exhaustion] for certain.

myth of happiness as their purported triedand-tested techniques. Here it is interesting to draw attention to Julliens observation of the endless acquisition of knowledge in the Western pursuit of happiness. By contrast, Chinese thought liberates this need through a more relaxed approach to the activity of learning: Your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger of exhaustion. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger [of exhaustion] for certain. (2007: 15). After all, for whose benefit is this advice for really? Instead of continuing to look for answers and buying into the myth that happiness is something that can be achieved, we have to see that happiness has become an industry it has, ultimately, become a commodity. Recently, critical accounts of this industry have appeared, one

of the most convincing ones being Barbara Ehrenreichs Smile or Die. She strongly criticizes positive thinking and argues that facts and studies that claim that positive feelings like gratitude, contentment and self-confidence can improve our health and lengthen our lives are greatly exaggerated (2009: 9). Positive thinking as a method emerged as a field of academic study at the end of 1990s following Martin Seligman s appointment as president for the American Psychological Association. Seligman declared the theme for his presidency positive psychology; the study or positive emotions and optimistic mindsets (2009:147). Following further academic interest, it became accepted as a new field of psychological research new journals appeared devoted to the subject, such as the Journal of Happiness Studies. When the media acknowledged the new science of happiness it rapidly spiralled
9

into a multi-million dollar industry of pop-psychology (2009:147-149). Positive thinking had emerged as new method for achieving happiness. A new type of entrepreneurship was created: life coaches and gurus started making fortunes through teaching doubtful techniques including mind control and self-hypnosis. Ehrenreich further argues that positive thinking has become a symbol of capitalism. She even goes as far as arguing it is not only a hypocritical but also consequently a fatal idea. George Bushs thumbs up gestures are cheerleading America and the world stubbornly refusing to imagine any possible negative scenarios (2009: 10). We seem to be hopelessly astray in our search. The pursuit of happiness can only have us running in circles because there is no final goal and even the idea that one might have existed has now also become a myth. Jullien further observes this: In the West, each successive generation has tried to conquer happiness anew by making a revolution of some kind, whether out of generosity or ingeniousness (2007: 106). We see today
10

that rather than one revolution for each generation, they emerge on a regular and continuous basis. It is evident that our search for happiness has created an industry we should be suspicious of. Yet, it can seem impossible for a capitalist society to adapt to the Chinese way of thinking that Jullien suggests. It is hard to see how these ideas could function in other aspects of life, such as work. However, the intention of this article has been only to show that when we see through the hypocritical myth of happiness, and stop listening to accounts of what life should be, we can ease some of this pressure to be happy. We are somewhat bipolar in our search for happiness, hence adapting ideas of Chinese philosophy sounds appealing: stop looking for those highs and just accept life as going well (2007:105). Imagine life or knowledge as a sketch, beginning to fade. It is light and fluid, barely perceptible there is no clear answer. Like Johnny Marco in Coppolas Somewhere, we venture off into the distance without a guiding map.

REFERENCES: Byrne, Rhonda, 2006. The Secret. Simon and Schuster, London. Ehrenreich, Barbara, 2009. Smile or Die- How positive thinking fooled America and the World. Granta Books, London. Jullien, Franois, 2007. Vital Nourishment, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Zone Books, New York.
11

MYTHE
by ADAM HUTCHINGS

MYTHE DE LA

The myth is a myth, but if the myth is the ocean, then what have I become as I sail across it?

12

ne tenth of a new century passes, a world warming now in the sweeping fabric of democracy, its unequivocal legitimacy. A mantra for capital is on the airwaves, hiding under the tables in countries we band together and name developing, ready to spring out and cry surprise! Twenty years ago, Francis Fukuyama hailed the End of History, the end of competing ideologies in the wake of a victorious liberal democracy, as the Berlin Wall fell. Paul Virilio, come the year 2000, contributes the End of Geography, as our hypermediated world shrinks to the size of a computer monitor. And in 2010 David Cameron comes to power and takes it all too literally . . .Fuck it, he says, to hell with all the humanities. The coffin has yet to receive the final nail, indeed the coffin has yet to be shut; but the vision is there, in the tabloids and broadsheets, in the corridors between offices, stamped on Jobseekers correspondence: all men and women to be hereby considered in economic terms. What has become of the individual, navigating the non-place of the 21st century, caught between the 2D commands of the billboard and the interminable influx of 24-hr opinion and commentary? THE MYTH OF THE WORLD Once upon a time, myths were the vehicles of stories, life-lessons, rituals, philosophical analogies, and so on. They told great truths, they provided entertainment the world, through myth, made sense. The purpose has now somewhat shifted, a shift noticed in the 1950s by Roland Barthes, a shift which has yet to stop shifting. As we push through the new century everything has become mediated, removed from its foundations, liberated from gravity, circulating through networks of interest and opin-

ion, ownership and rejection. We no longer constitute myths from our findings in the world, we constitute the world from myths: the city, the forest, the ocean all myths; politicians substantiate claims with myths; PR companies present myths, activists expose these myths with myths of their own; the Daily Mail survives on myths; your Facebook page is a myth; the way I wear my scarf is a myth; the stock market responds to myths; banknotes; capital; the economy, transpolitisised, to use a Baudrillardian term, launched into an orbit beyond the relations of production and political contradictions; (1993:10) all myths. Roland Barthes, the man of myth par excellence, provides us with our understanding of myth. In his book Mythologies he was dealing with semiology, the science of signs, descended from Saussurian linguistics. The arbitrary yet conventional structures of language have been found to play an interesting analogous role in thinking about the structures we find in society. In language, a sign is created by a correspondence between a signifier and a signified: that which refers, and that to which is referred. For Barthes, myth is a type of speech, a mode of signification, a metalanguage that acts like a passenger to a primary language, the first sign in a chain. Social usage which is added to pure matter: pure matter betrothed with meaning through the power of connotation. The myth functions as the purification of complex experience and acts. It naturalises and depoliticises, it establishes a blissful clarity. It amounts to a simplification of life through part-prescribed messages held within signs, an acceptance of prevailing notions of normality due to their gradual mythification. Barthes considered myths to be a tool of the bourgeoisie, for the depoliticisation of ideologies to maintain hegemonic continuity. It is not make-believe that makes some13

thing a myth, but manipulation.1 I think we can use myth to further diagnose our predicament within what Mark Fisher refers to as capitalist realism the condition in which capitalism, true to its nature, has subsumed all reactionary or emancipatory gestures. The present conditions of the digitised western world enable a situation in which all aspects of life have meanings that transcend themselves; the world of now is one in which nothing is sacred. This is due to the collective effort of economics and mass media, summed up by the term consumer culture. Society reflects the economy, that big Other which determines our existence and positions us in accordance with it. Our potential is measured in terms of money, and it is our responsibility to make the right choices at all stages of life with the aim of realising this potential. If we fail, we have only ourselves to blame. We also have a social responsibility, which consists in ensuring the welfare of the country by performing as well as we can keeping the economy afloat by shopping, making sure we avoid harmful unemployment. If we fail here we are told off by the media, and told to improve. This condition has become illuminated in the aftermath of the crisis, where we discover the futility of arguing against the charging bull of mainstream economics, and the neoliberal assertion which posits that the market supersedes the state in organising society. The current government is able to deflect all indictments of wrongdoing and unfairness by pointing to the economy, standing back and shrugging. Each new measure imposed carries with it the further entrenchment of these ideals, from education (studentconsumers) to healthcare (patientconsumers).

But it is not only the consumer that is affected by this treatment, it is also the consumed, a realm which is expanding interminably. As a society infected by non-stop mass media we are constantly exposed to the world as seen through a lens, and made sense through an editorial narrative. Here we realise that nothing is untouched by the media gaze, and we question the extent to which we access something independently of that gaze. Within this hyperreality all the world is a myth, a myth constituted by an infinite number of minor myths. This is not only due to our mediated access to the world, but due to our treatment of things as consumers, the social usage which is added to pure matter. The Big Society, seen in this way, is a myth not because it doesnt exist, or wont exist, but because of its ability, as an idea, to signify other things the revival of strong communities, the decentralisation of power, and so on; or, the wealth divides, the library closures, the expansion of the private sector, the deficit, bankers bonuses, and so on. This signification is purely subjective, as malleable as the plasticity of our age, and provides ammunition for those who have agendas and interests. As responsible consumers who are simultaneously producers, bargaining with human capital, we all have agendas and interests. THE MYTH OF THE MYTH Is there a myth of the myth? Is this tantamount to suggesting that the myth is a myth? It is, and it isnt. I am not asking whether myth as a thing, a tool as it were, has somehow become mythical, that is, redundant in an age hard-wired with science, or irreducible to fixed meanings in an age which has a tendency to deconstruct. This would be to consider myth in the colloquial sense, not the Barthesian one. Instead,

14

Within this hyperreality all the world is a myth, a myth constituted by an infinite number of minor myths. This is not only due to our mediated access to the world, but due to our treatment of things as consumers, the social usage which is added to pure matter.

I wish to extend the myth, in the manner that Barthes extends the sign. I think this is required because myths have surpassed signs in their role of governance, and have their own quality of signification. I therefore ask what the myth gives rise to, what is myths myth? I propose that this phrase, the myth is a myth, is both a tautology and a performative. When we say the table is a table or the idiot is an idiot we achieve nothing, we merely call them what they are. Calling the myth a myth could do this, but to what end? It is a waste of time. But maybe not, for calling the myth a myth is also an act, it bestows something extra upon the myth. That extra something implies a myth of the myth, something that exists due to its dependency on the original myth. But we have to remember that the myth already referred to something else an object, a claim, a concept, the myth-story. The myth is a myth, but if the myth is the ocean, then what have I become as I sail across it? As the media permeates all aspects of life, the web of signification expands. Nothing is exempt from becoming a victim of discourse. This pattern plays out within the myth of neoliberal consumer capitalism, which goes unquestioned depoliticised and naturalised, a tried and true ideal. Considering Fishers diagnosis and Fukuyamas End of History assertion we seem to have upon us a time in which ideology is dead. But this is not quite the case. As iek says with typical boisterousness, we only have to go to the toilet to be once again confronted with ideology2. It is not that alternative ideologies dont exist, but rather that all actions, notions and ideas, emancipatory or otherwise, have now become things which are effectively consumed, thereby playing directly into capitalist logic, enabled by the hypermediation of discourse. I would like therefore to reluctantly
15

entomb the End of Psychogeography in philosopys necropolis, for we have become less psychogeographers than consumers of Guy Debord. We are unable to fully emancipate ourselves from the oppression of the city, but we are happy enough to continually reference the idea in the hope of its realisation. We may even plan a day around it: maybe even leave our GoogleMapped iPhones at home so as to not be tempted to rationalise our drive. Indeed, as Sven Ltticken has recently pointed out, some of Debords visions came ironically close to describing post-Fordism,3 and moreover dtournement is embroiled in a continuous struggle against corporate recuperation. In the same way, we do not merely watch TV, so much as we become TV-watchers. This condition requires a new level of signification, an extension of the Barthesian semiotic chain shown above, wherein we recognise that the new sign created by the myth is not where it ends; the myth breeds, it interacts, it creates users. Indeed, a chain is not sufficient, as Barthes has implied by pointing out that the diagram is metaphorical; the movement is infinite and non-linear.. An audacious extension to the diagram (with the necessary inaccuracy that comes with representation) where the new sign (III) is treated as yet another signifier (A), corresponding to a new signified (B), would in turn create a new sign (C), a new myth, which, instead of being a metalanguage in reference to a sign, is in fact a metalanguage in reference to a myth. It is thus a myth of the myth. But what is it? We have signs and we have myths, but a notable lack of the subject. Does the subject not interact with this language of myth? Is (s)he not the agent who enables the circulation of such myths? In a time of mass consumption, mass marketing, non-stop hypermediated experiences, where the consumer is
16

simultaneously the producer, is the subject perhaps that which is signified by a myth? More precisely, it is the subjectposition which has become mythical: a signified-through-connotation subject-position. As Chantal Mouffe argues:

Within every society, each social agent is inscribed in a multiplicity of social relationsnot only social relations of production but also the social relations, among others, of sex, race, nationality, and vicinity. All these social relations determine positionalities or subject-positions and every social agent is therefore a locus of many subject-positions and cannot be reduced to only one. (Mouffe, 1988: 90)
This complex process has to be thought of as an ongoing negotiation between selffashioning and interpellation, a struggle which highlights the question of agency. The Facebook page sums this up nicely, the most explicit symptom of todays hyperreality: we are free to characterise ourselves in precisely the way we want, but those characterisations are determined. We have specific areas in which we express our individuality, which become units with which we differentiate ourselves from others. They provide a construction of ourselves based on our employment situation, our shopping habits and favourite quotes; constructions which cannot help but be influenced by the external myths of the world and are thus infinitely simplified, reduced to market rationale, idealised. We in turn provide links to adverts of those very things, so others can get involved and be individual in the same way. Our schools, our religion, our taste in music and movies, our political orientation they all sit alongside our date of birth and a photo. We have the oppor-

tunity to share this individuality with status updates, wording it how we like, our token moment of agency in this highly controlled arena (assuming use of language is an act of agency). It is PR embodied, our friends consume us, our carefully thought-out reproduced selves nothing is accidental. The myth has become a myth when the myth becomes a signifier for something else it is the social utility not of the sign, but of the myth, the place where we begin to define ourselves and define others: social constructs contingent on myths, plucked from discourse, embodied in people. It is the myth of Goldsmiths, functioning somewhere inside me; it is Adam Hutchings the cultural theorist, having his article title in French because it sounds more profound. It is the markets interest in the essence of our respective in-

dividualities, the wish to quantify that data and make it economically valid. The triumph first of democracy and now capitalism, in their newly unquestionable guises, and the hyperreality that mediates them, renders ideology itself a myth. Our societies and economies are increasingly depoliticised and naturalised, saturated with consumerism. There, within this myth, we wander under the omnipresent glare of CCTV, window-shopping through life, both the watched and the watcher, each and everyone a myth in their own right. Like a satellite navigation system, a myth to guide us, inform us, tell us when we have done wrong, we enlist the myth as we advance up the street of life. We surrender our instinct to the sat-nav, we surrender our being to the myth.

REFERENCES: Barthes, Roland. Myth Today in Mythologies. London & New York, 1993 Baudrillard, Jean. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict. London: Verso, 1993. Fisher, M. Capitalist Realism. Ropley: 0 Books, 2009. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1992. Ltticken, Sven. Playtimes in New Left Review 66, November-December 2010, 125-140. Mouffe, Chantal. Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Toward a New Concept of Democracy in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 89-105. Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2000. iek, Slavoj. The Plague of Phantasies. London: Verso, 1997. NOTES: 1. Barthes myth diagram, Mythologies, p. 110 2. iek explains how the differing attitudes of Germany, France, and Britain/America are reflected in their relative methods for the disposal of their shit. 3. Ltticken traces conceptions of play to its contemporary immersion within the working day, typified by Googles Googleplex, a beacon of post-Fordist employment sensibilities.

17

the myth of student violence

by AMEDEO POLICANTE

et us take these two images. I use them to signify the spectre of violence that animated the multitude of student protests that swept over Europe in the last convulsed months. The images confront us with a series of questions interrogating the nature of the present political axiomatic: What is student violence? What is police violence? What is social peace and how violent can it be? In semiotic terms, these pictures are signs of violence. This much is clear. But this does not mean that they are merely empty signifiers expressing the concept of violence. More precisely,
18

they are violent images. They can be decomposed into the picture an empty signifier that offers itself to interpretation and violence, a concept; both the photograph and the concept existed before being united in our gaze in this third object, which is the sign. In other words, as pointed out by Roland Barthes, the images can be made to signify several things, they are mere signifiers; but if we weight them with a definite signified, they will become signs (Barthes, 1973: 120) There is something inherently ambivalent about these pictures: on the one hand, their composition has a

simple meaning: a woman is throwing an object at a shop window; a police officer is attacking the crowd. And on the other hand the pictures are unmistakably there in order to signify something else to me. Inasmuch as they are addressed to me sitting at home, reading my newspaper, while I sip a cup of tea they tell me clearly: We are photographic examples illustrating that, because of the protest, where there was once peace, there is now violence. A set of similar pictures in the Daily Mirror website went under the name Student protest in London turns to

violence. Another collection, published in the Guardian was entitled: Student protests: peaceful gathering turns nasty. Demonstrations and rallies turn into violence and nastiness like milk left under the sun. Therefore, violence is not inscribed in any system of meaning, it simply appears, naturally and inexplicably. This exemplary value of the image is produced, at least in part, by the thick fog surrounding the action it depicts. The image can tell me very little about the demonstrator and why she is performing a certain action; it cannot show me what happened immediately before and
19

Demonstrations and rallies turn into violence and nastiness like milk left under the sun. Therefore, violence is not inscribed in any system of meaning, it simply appears, naturally and inexplicably.

immediately afterwards; even less can it tell me the story of the protester and of the policeman: what orders were given, what words were said, what system of power is at play in such an action. The picture is forever framed and its temporal and spatial surroundings remain inaccessible. Inevitably, the images fundamental signification is to impose itself on its viewer as an example of exceptional violence. We are confronted by a double level of inscription. The meaning of the picture may well be just this: a young protester is throwing a computer screen into a shop window. Yet, I see very well that it wants to signify something more to me: that the protests were violent, that participating in a protest means to open up a state of exception and a state of danger that breaks the normal working of the state. This double level of inscription is what Roland Barthes called the mythical metalanguage. There is a meaning, formed at the linguistic level a protester is performing a violent act that, reduced to empty form, is further filled up by a signified: the violence of the protest opposes itself to the normality of peace. Finally, it appears the image is a sign of an exceptional and incomprehensible violence. If one encloses the pictures in a purely linguistic system, the pictures do not
20

speak for themselves; rather, they pose a series of questions that can be answered only in a mythical form: Why is the protester performing a violent act? What is the relation between this violent act and the wider events that took place during the protest? What is the relation of this particular act of violence with the general social system in which it takes form? What compound of forces and what existential and historical conditions guide the hand of the protester? In other words, what is the political and historical meaning of this act? This questioning performed by the sign at the linguistic level opens the picture to the necessary appropriation of its form by a mythical structure of signification, which allows the reader to give an answer to her discomforting multitude of doubts. In order to enter this wider system of signification that makes the picture political, nevertheless, the image must empty itself of its contingency. We must put in brackets the particular and contingent conditions of the protester and of the act, in order to fill their actions with a wider political meaning. This political meaning is the motive, causing the myth to be uttered. In contemporary bourgeois society the hegemonic political myth in relation to violence is that we live in a state of prosperity and peace, a civil order

The total semiotic effect of such an operation is to confront us with the image of a violence that cannot be stopped because it has no meaning, a violence that is everywhere because it is natural, and against which only the continual and careful surveillance of the state can save us.

that is continuously threatened by sudden outbursts of irrational and inexplicable violence. Through this concept, a whole new history is instilled in the image. The act performed by the protester becomes an unjustifiable, irrational and yet fully natural in the sense that it is not inscribed in any wider political framework outburst of violence. The total semiotic effect of such an operation is to confront us with the image of a violence that cannot be stopped because it has no meaning, a violence that is everywhere because it is natural, and against which only the continual and careful surveillance of the state can save us. The myth therefore, as Barthes points out, functions as a perpetual alibi that keeps at distance the uncanny questioning of violence and its representation. Barthes says that myth is depoliticized speech, but it would be more accurate to say that bourgeois myth is depoliticized since only this has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal (Barthes, 1973: 142). What Barthes does not recognize is that the world does not supply us with an historical reality, but rather a set of uncanny questions that cannot be answered outside of a mythical structure. It is true that myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things

but this is a loss that always precedes the myth and that cannot be prevented. In the case of our image, the contingency of the protester and of the protest cannot be retrieved not even by the protester himself and it is lost forever. The world is constituted by contingent historical realities, but these are never supplied to us, rather they always and fundamentally escape us. This is not to say that there is nothing wrong with bourgeois mythology or that it is a simple and necessary gesture. We must distinguish the structure of the myth and the mythical concept provided by bourgeois ideology. It is only the latter that depoliticizes and naturalizes violence, making us fearful subjects, constantly tempted to summon the state as shelter from a looming catastrophe. It is only the latter that purifies subjective violence, disentangling its outbursts from the wider political conditions of our capitalist and biopolitical society. We must reject the pastoral mythology of the state. And yet, we cannot go back to a genuine historical reality because this is never offered to us. There is no neutral position, from which to recover a disembodied objective truth. Instead of falling into nihilist despair, nevertheless, we can deploy other meanings, other structures of signification,
21

opening the possibility of an alternative political myth whose efficacy can be determined only through resistance and struggle. This political mythology would appeal to a Foucauldian and historicist understanding of violence for which: [] political power does not begin when war ends. Law is not pacification, for beneath the law, war continues to rage in all mechanisms of power, even in the most regular. In the smallest of its cogs peace is waging a secret war. Peace itself is a coded war (Foucault, 2003: 50). A meta-language of signification that would find its concept in a simple Benjaminian fragment: catastrophe is simply that things go on (Benjamin, 1985: 51). In other words, violence can only be understood against the background of a particular historically determined conception of the state we live in, in which single acts of violence will inevitably be inscribed. Critical theory, therefore, is nothing but the attempt to disentangle ourselves from the assumption of peace as normality in order to read the political event against the backdrop of an ongoing

political confrontation which has its material manifestations and its cognitive truth-effects. We are constantly in a state of exception, a magmatic and pervasive state of violence in which subjective violence inscribes itself. Objective violence is like the dark matter, it is that historico-political compound of forces whose nature escapes representation, and yet has real effects that we can witness with our eyes every day. For a long time physicists were confronted by strange and uncanny movements of material particles that seemed to escape meaning. These, just like the violence portrayed in these images, appeared as fully natural movements in the sense that they were not caused by anything but nature in general. Now we say that it is the invisible contingency of the dark matter that guides, and lies behind, those movements. The myth of the real spectre of capital, a historical force at once violent and subterranean, enters the arena against the naturalization, neutralization and depoliticization of violence. .

REFERENCES Barthes, R. Mythologies, London: Jonathan Cape, 1973. Benjamin, W. Central Park. New German Critique 34 (1985). Foucault, M. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975-76. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
22

WHAT WE CAME FOR

by LARA CHOKSEY Bright lights at Waterloo, Sweep of rubbish under brush. Yellow rays beam promises, Drown the crowd and persecute. Electric boards of times and places Condition operating spaces. We travellers sit silent, Joined by dots of coffee drops. Unseen cords bind limbs to plastic chairs, Tied up fists clutch wilted pasts. Once the world was dark, The platforms blue and shadowed. We ran to stalls for eggs and packs of cards, Ran back to trains and ate and played. Then light injected life, Expectation turned demanding. Things became measured. Blank fluorescence grips us senseless, An exit lined with cars and buses. Orange lamps spectre concrete paths, Forbidding journeys into dark. Cornered shadows shiver mute sobs, Wrenching marching breaking passing Chronological masks. Eyes turned to endless tunnels, We travellers depart.
23

COALITION OF THE WILLING BY KNIFE PARTY: RESPONSE

text by CLAUDIA FIRTH images by ALICE WHITE www. alicewhiteart.com

All about love , 2007, images by Alice Heart www.alicewhiteart.com

All about Love , 2007

24

oalition of the Willing is the latest short animation film by Knife Party, otherwise known as Simon Robson, film director and animator. Previous projects have included What Barry Said, made in response to the US invasion of Iraq and animated sections of Taking Liberties, a documentary addressing the decline of Civil Liberties in the UK since 1997. Coalition of the Willing critiques capitalism through the current ecological crisis and posits the potential of open source culture and social networking as the solution. Simon worked in coalition with a number of animators. The stylistically different sections of the film were posted online in the form of a blog as they were completed. This opened up an online space for discussion even before the film was finished. Ideas about collaborative and collective working are therefore reflected both in terms of the films content and through its mode of production. The title, Coalition of the Willing, references George Bushs use of the term for those nations willing to back the war in Iraq. War is referenced throughout the film but in terms of the war effort needed in response to the ecological crisis; that is by necessity of reducing production and consumption, a war on consumer capitalism. After introducing the post-Copenhagen global situation as ecological stalemate, Coalition of the Willing traces the current form of neoliberal capitalism back to the 1960s. It argues that a new generation

intent on rebelling against their parents world of wartime austerity and Fordist labour found new forms of expression that were quickly subsumed by capitalism as a fresh market to sell consumer items to. However, it also attests that the 60s was just as much about collective action as it was individual gratification, and that it was this spirit that transformed society. The film contends that the open source software movement continues this tradition with people contributing to the source code for the good of the whole rather than for individual gain. It tells us that a global collaborative movement could be organised through the tools of Web 2.0 and uses Wikipedia and Facebook as examples of models that could be adapted to work towards the green war effort. At the end of the film we are entreated to Log on, Converge and Swarm. I watched the film in the cinematic space of a London Short Film Festival screening. Although broadly sympathetic to the arguments made, far from feeling fired up, I felt beaten down by one of the many literal and metaphoric hammers that feature in the film.The other films in the programme were all short documentaries which were either observational or personal in style. Only those from a personal perspective used any prolonged voiceover. Coalition of the Willing, however, used voiceover all the way through the film over and above the constantly changing graphics, music
25

Nightmares , 2007

and sound effects. Serious, authoritative and urgent, reminiscent of old government information films and wartime propaganda, it guided us through the visual and aural bombardment towards the solution to the ecological crisis. Viewed in relation to the other films in the programme, there was very little space for reflection. There was scant opportunity for the audience to think independently or come to our own conclusions. We were definitively told what the solutions were and how they would work. Coalition of the Willing advocates that through the Internet, people could contribute to the design of new green products and innovations as well as giving their time to take part in practical projects. Theorists such as Michael Bauwens et al have gone so far as to suggest that this kind of contribution could even become the basis for a whole new economic model. With both the anti-cuts protests happening here and the momentous events in the
26

Middle East, we can see how effective Web 2.0 tools are for organising activists and mobilising numbers of people. It is very obvious that social networking media have an important part to play in disseminating information and organising people in a way that is quite revolutionary and groundbreaking. However, using it to create new designs and products raises the question of economic exploitation and points to where current conservative neoliberal ideas about Big Society voluntarism overlap with models of self organisation. The film asserts that change is within our grasp if we harness the power that the Internet offers us and entreats us to behave as a swarm. Ideas about swarm politics and hive mind are very prevalent within theories about the potential of the Internet and social networking. There is no doubt that we have to work against the atomisation caused by capitalist consumer culture and that en masse people are stronger and can achieve far greater change

Cinema is a very powerful vehicle for producing affect, but it also has the potential to be a mode of thinking that exists in the minds of the audience as they fill in the spaces between the images and information presented. Coalition of the Willing seems to ignore this potential for audience interaction.

Fluffy the Transvestite , 2007

than as individuals. But although the insect metaphor offers ideas of some kind of collective intelligence, insects do not think as autonomous individuals. As a piece of propaganda for the war effort, Coalition of the Willing takes itself very seriously. Propaganda aims to influence an audience with a powerful message. It is designed to appeal both to our emotions and our minds respectively. Strong visual and graphic language has historically been associated with propaganda (designed at its inception to appeal to people with low levels of literacy). Coalition of the Willing implicitly poses itself in opposition to another main way that graphic language and techniques are used to influence and bombard, namely advertising. If we compare these two kinds of manipulative media techniques, the one, akin to the information film, appeals to our sense of justice and attachment to a cause, encouraging the viewer to work together with others to create a mass movement, while advertising appeals to us as individuals and works on our unconscious desires. The film takes the position that we need to wake people up from the hypnotic state induced by consumer culture. Advertising has its part to play in this mass hypnosis. Coalition of the Willing could be read as an attempt to wake the audience up from this state but the sustained bombardment of the visual, audio and verbal messages competing for our attention could also have been intended to create hypnotic effect of its own. Through this sensory bombardment and the use of continual voiceover, Coalition of the Willing entreats us to take action while treating the collective cinematic audience as passive, with the tone being: there is no time to think, we have to act, theres a war on. While it is true that in terms of actual climate change, we do not
27

know how much time there is left before the tipping point, this very seriousness and urgency can be off-putting if it does not coincide with the audiences own anger or outrage, hence feeling beaten up. Interestingly, one of the things that makes some advertising so effective is that it is sometimes very knowing in its manipulation, the subtext is often framed in a clever, selfreflexive or parodying way: we know that you know that this is ridiculous and you wont believe it but play the game with us anyway. This ability not to take itself too seriously often works in its favour as it credits the audience with some intelligence (even if its not very much) while at the same time being utterly stupid and ridiculous (wink, wink). The way in which capitalism dynamically subsumes radical language through advertising highlights the difficulty the left has finding speech that is not just empty dead rhetoric. The difficulty with straight propaganda is precisely that its one dimensionality allows no space for self critique. Cinema is a very powerful vehicle for producing affect, but it also has the potential to be a mode of thinking that exists in the minds of the audience as they fill in the spaces between the images and information presented. Coalition of the Willing seems to ignore this potential for audience interaction. However, rather than a cinema audience, perhaps it is better to look at Coalition of the Willing within the context of the medium that it has most connection with, that is, the Internet. The sheer amount and speed of information that we are able to access on the Internet arguably means that there is no space for deep thinking, just time to register the information we have been given and this film seems to work in a similar way. On
28

These Supine Days , 2007

Viewed in relation to the other films in the programme, there was very little space for reflection. There was scant opportunity for the audience to think independently or come to our own conclusions. We were definitively told what the solutions were and how they would work.

the other hand, viewers can post their comments immediately on the blog and share them with others, like they could even while the film was being produced. This is a very different kind of collectivity than that of a cinema audience and a different kind of interactivity. Are the Internet and Web 2.0 better and more direct than collective cinematic experience or just different? Are they any more likely to facilitate social change or do they both just provide a feeling of collectivity that does not necessarily result in action? These questions lead to the much larger debate about how to build a mass movement with subjects that are able to remain autonomous within it, something that the socialist movement grappled with throughout the 20th century and which we will have to address if real change is going to happen. Our challenge is how to self organise and mobilise whilst ensuring that people are able to think for themselves. Deep thinking is still necessary. I am left wondering who Coalition of the Willing is for. Is it meant to wake us up from our consumerist slumber, or just preaching to the converted who have already logged on? A hammer is a blunt instrument that has its uses but sometimes subtler surgical precision would be more effective.

29

Take the power back! - Echoes of a myth: Marxist resistance theory in a musical performance by Rage Against the Machine.
by IZABELA LYRA

rom an anthropological perspective, myth a story passed down from generation to generation, is a puzzling and complex source of information about a society. Consequently it could be defined in various terms: from a representation and validation of cosmology in pre-industrial societies (Frazer 1922); to a recognition of myths pragmatic and discursive qualities (Malinowski 1922); or in terms of understanding myth as an ingenious way of coping with existential dilemmas (Sahlins 1981). Perhaps the greatest contribution to the studies of myth comes from Claude Lvi-Strauss (1978), who set out to explain how people related to the world through and in these stories. Principally when anthropologists discuss myth they refer to orally transmitted ancestral messages of people who live in exotic locations and who do not necessarily have the need to write their tales down. When ancestral stories are being told, they are sometimes accompanied by dance, song or a pattern on materials to associate the members of community with their heritage. Therefore myth has a key function of relating and re-telling a tribes history, and at times may be used to justify something, like a land claim in the case of Lakota Indians of Black Hills (Kurkiala 2002). In such circumstances myth has a political
30

function for resolving challenging disputes. Yet to state that it is always the purpose behind myth would be inaccurate. Ultimately myth might be interpreted as a tale carrying a promise of what once was but is no more yet could be again. This kind of story reveals itself in a vision of utopia, which according to Marxist principles, was a definitive goal that society should strive to achieve (Graeber 2010). Are these ideals what contemporary political activists aspire to? In this essay I investigate a myth that is also a sacred story which relates the supernatural (ideal) to the mundane and is reinforced by a performed ritual. I will focus on the act of myth telling and its reception at a Rage Against the Machine (RATM) performance, during which the ritual process becomes a cue to understanding the altered state experienced collectively during a festival. The human bodies draw together in rhythmic seizures devoting themselves to the music, an experience perhaps best described in terms of a mystical religious observance. To use a parallel, myth telling is ritualized during the performance where the priests/ RATM take to the stage and the believers/ audience participate below. Hence my initial dilemmas: is it a valid question to ask if myth-telling is still practised today in the West? Could myth be appropriated as a

Night-Time squid for lovers , 2005, image by Alice White. www. alicewhiteart.com

31

form of political critique? It is this essays contention that while myth in RATMs song is a radical response to ideology of the state, its efficacy is however uncertain. MYTH In order to illustrate this claim, the interpretation of RATMs song Take the Power Back ought to be taken a bit further. Myth may possibly represent tales about template characters (archetypes), which go back to the origins of the society (Eliade 1959). One could relate this generic idea to some myths, the Greek ones in particular. In this vein Marxist resistance myth contained in the aforementioned song is embedded in an older, Promethean myth, in as much as it refers to a hero (people in struggle/ working class), in some cyclical time, who raises and steals power from the gods (or in this case the state). Prometheus stole fire from the god Zeus to benefit and empower a struggling humanity with technology. Heroes are carriers of hope, are they not? On the unconscious level, myths strike that familiar, responsive chord in humans. Hence the musical product of the aforementioned band reveals itself as a retelling of the resistance myth and I think it resonates with the audiences expectations of the meaning of resistance. So-called facts are fraud. They want us to allege and pledge And bow down to their God Lost the culture, the culture lost Spun our minds and through time Ignorance has taken over Yo, we gotta take the power back! Thus the resistance myth in RATMs song reveals itself in terms of the Prometheus quest where the power (knowledge, fire) needs to be reclaimed from the state (gods). Translating into the Marxist terminology espoused by RATM,
32

our society is in a state of constant tension between social classes, originally the oppressed proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The latter is the holder of all privileges. The struggle leads to physical expressions of dismay in the form of a strike against the cause of that rage: () and to counteract we gotta take the power back. At this point power and resistance to its oppressive source, stands for possibility and the opportunity to be an architect of ones own destiny according to RATM. I ought to explain why I refer to such resistance in terms of a myth. Marxs writings in this analysis are considered to be romantic to a certain extent, especially in his depiction of a struggling class that is powerless, overwhelmed by ideology, until it takes the power back. This is in accordance with a traditional reading of Michel Foucaults theory of power and his critique of Marxism as a revolutionary process (Foucault 1980). Foucault recognized the increasingly elusive character of power in modern Western society and that it is directed at our bodies whereas Marx locates it within consciousness and ideology. Jeffrey Nealon (2008) has extrapolated Foucaults philosophy, revealing the impossibility to identify and locate the exercise of power and of resistance outside of the humans own body. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counterattack in that same body (Foucault 1980:56). Hence, according to Nealon, work on contemporary culture must consistently be reinscribed outside the binary realm of resistance versus power (2008:111). Therefore a reference in a RATM song to an oppressor, which has been located in the state is somewhat misleading. The complexity of Foucaults idea reveals precisely that there are forms of oppression but no obvious oppressor whom we can

try to resist. Bureaucracy is one example of Foucauldian forms of oppression. Foucaults ideas about power were influenced by what Friedrich Nietzsches termed the will to power, a primordial will to establish ones domination. Authorities agenda, be it the state or the church, is clearly to contain that potential all humans possess. Often our (Western) common perceptions of power, or the Nietzschean will to power, is limited to the (distractive) binary distinctions often projected as class differences. Therefore the appeal of conventional messages communicated in RATMs song Take the Power Back resonates with our socialist convictions. The power is out there, and the state has it but ultimately it must be returned to the people (proletariat).

Step back, I know who I am Raise up your ear, Ill drop the style and clear Its the beats and the lyrics they fear The rage is relentless We need a movement with a quickness You are the witness of change And to counteract. We gotta take the power back
RITUAL According to Zach de la Rocha, lead singer, the purpose of the band is to bridge the gap between entertainment and activism; first and foremost, thats our goal (Gavin 2000). This statement is supported by the bands bio on their authorized website that lists their involvement in a great deal of political activism. One of their recent and spectacular answers to fan requests was a free gig in Finsbury Park, London. Although I was not able to attend this particular

performance I had a chance to participate in an earlier one, during an annual gathering branded the Download Festival, in June 2010. RATM were one of the invited artists, and had been much anticipated after the band had split in 2000 to reform in 2007. Though before I relate the ritual telling of the myth to RATMs song, I will briefly outline some anthropological definitions of the phenomenon. There have been many ethnographic and theoretical studies of ritual (such as Leach 1968; Bloch 1989; Turner 1995). Essentially ritual is an act, but to distinguish it from just any action it is often spoken of in context of the sacred (which has the connotation of separateness). Therefore, to use a parallel again, ritual in its structure resembles a sanctified act one could experience during any church mass. It involves a priest, or other competent official who leads the ceremony: there is an offering, such as the Eucharist, in some cases sacrificial animal, or plant. The most compelling feature of the ritual is the formalizing attribute of the gesture. Edmund Leach defined such ceremonies and rites as non-instinctive actions (Leach 1968). What I observed during a day at the Download festival, to use this parallel, was a ceremonial (priestly) communication with the crowd. Zach de la Rocha took on the role of a messenger who, by way of energetic performance communicated a mythical content to the wide reception. The context of the act is important too. The stage during the performance was decorated with potent revolutionary paraphernalia, like Communist red stars, which only reinforced the impression that something special was occurring. The gathered crowd responded to the musicians with awe and worshipful gaze but at times with animation depending on the pace of the music.
33

the ritual process becomes a cue to understanding the altered state experienced collectively during a festival. The human bodies draw together in rhythmic seizures devoting themselves to the music, an experience perhaps best described in terms of a mystical religious observance.

An argument about the nature of the communication medium, such as a song, was put forward by Maurice Bloch (1989). In his words, [r]itual is an occasion where syntactic and other linguistic freedoms are reduced because ritual makes special uses of language: characteristically stylized speech and singing (Bloch 1989:20). Effective singing requires special qualities like skilled performance of melody, dynamics or rhythm, privileged over saying things normally, and for Bloch this affects the meaning and reception. Consequently language formalised in such a restrictive way, according to Bloch, is impoverished but that has a purpose: The individuality and historicity of events disappear since irrespective of minor differences these events are all like the scriptural examples (Bloch 1989:27). To summarize, the song in retaining all of the discussed traits has a potential to reinforce a ritual with its authoritative form and mythical content. In myth, timelessness of the story and temporality of the gesture make the whole experience more profound. In Take the power back the message of the song becomes timeless through the ritual that accompanies it; that is, the public release of frustration during the festival has a desirable effect. While the lead singer is an agent performing the chanting and thus initiating the ritual, the crowd also actively participates. Nevertheless it is apparent who is in a position to enchant and to
34

channel an effective story, igniting this active potential.The story told by the performer is appealing on its own but together with the ritual it unleashes even more. In this case, one cannot be interpreted without the other. Only then the revolutionary potential also contained in the myth becomes apparent. The opportunity unravels before us, like that of Georges Batailles (1991) vision of collective sovereignty and revolutionary struggle being enacted in the festival. CONCLUDING REMARKS I do not intend to dismiss resistance and its creative forms, be they music performance, protest, strike, or demonstration as irrelevant or invalid approaches to, what appears to be, a Hobbesian struggle for control. Instead I have focused on the role of mythical content and its reception in the performance of a RATM song that literally calls on us to take the power back. Myth and ritual together are potential channels through which force flows to reach and influence the recipients. However the timeworn Communist ideals might obscure the solution to what is happening presently in the society. I would suggest that as humans we exercise our will/power all the time, and to go against the established order of things, or to not buy and consume in abundance, presents just some of the possibilities. Call it will or power, it is in everything in all our conscious acts. The myth of resistance, the

recurring theme of struggle against the oppression in order to enable ourselves, is obscuring the truth of our everyday agency.That in turn leads to the problem of ineffectiveness of the will to power today. People feel subjugated (until the power is claimed back) and express ritualised dismay during the festival, but after the ceremony return to their everyday lives and embrace the stereotypical norms. Like in a cycle, the same message goes round in an orderly fashion as it has been and as it will. This

illusory balance, the yin-yang mutuality of us and them is created and maintained. Perhaps unwittingly RATM participates in recreating the established order by transmitting a myth rather than stimulating forward-thinking, or bringing chaos with a pending promise of order. The emerging tension between how to communicate the revolutionary content that by definition comprises of new and not readily conceivable ideas in terms understandable to the public is a challenge indeed.

REFERENCES Bataille, Georges. The Festival, or the Transgression of Prohibitions in The Accursed Share: an Essay on General Economy Volume II, III, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1991. Bloch, Maurice. Ritual, History and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology. London: Athlone, 1989. Eliade, Mircea. Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Harper, 1959. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, trans. Colin Gordon Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980. Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A study in Magic and Religion. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1922. Gavin (2000) http://www.accidentprone.com/ragefaq/ramfaq32.txt Graeber, David. Communism in Keith Hart, Jean-Louis Laville and Antonio David Cattani (eds) The Human Economy: A Citizens Guide. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2010. Kurkiala, Mikael. Objectifying the Past: Lakota Responses to Western Historiography. Critique of Anthropology Vol 22(4), 2002, 445-460. Leach, Edmund. Ritual in Stephen Hugh-Jones and James Lidlaw (eds) The Essential Edmund Leach Volume I. New Heaven: Yale University Press, 1968. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge, 1978. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: an Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea London: Routledge, 1922. Nealon, Jefrey T. Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984. Stanford University Press, 2008. Sahlins, Marshall. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History Of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995.
35

LAURA OLDFIELD FORD

2013

Angel Lane to Chobham Road. All images by Laura Oldfield Ford

Mounting excitement, intoxicating dizzying syntax, endless architectures. Red lipstick smeared across face, eyes flashing with the thrill of an encounter.

36

alking along the Northern outfall is a melancholy experience.The phantom of an invented, slickly choreographed future haunts the landscape. Photoshopped families, the joyful inhabitants of the new yuppiedromes are not here yet, but their avatars stalk us.

Amidst the rubble and chaos, Polish construction workers in luminous garb bundle in and out of vans for papers and fags. Oily leatherskins deconstruct the rusting heaps. Sometimes theres a group of kids with a nicked scooter, always the same, taking apart, a destructive urge; sections examined and strewn across the Greenway path. The area is cut, scrutinized, destroyed, not rebuilt but cast off as parts hurled across a flat expanse. The sewage pipe is the conduit, it slices through the wreckage and gives a Gods eye view of the marshes. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
37

Top: Abandoned pub. Below: Trowbridge estate

Drawn East, the marshes, footbridge over the Lea. Mounting excitement, intoxicating dizzying syntax, endless architectures. Red lipstick smeared across face, eyes flashing with the thrill of an encounter. We pick through ruins, an abandoned rose garden, bleached landscapes; we roam under motorway flyovers, towerblocks cascading down embankments. Time, multi faceted and crystalline. Language shifting. Heaps of tyres smoulder, nuclear bunkers echo beneath soft ground. Sky glowing violet. Beyond the heaps of dusty bricks, the crumbling walls a huge steel structure rises ,spanned with ivy and graffiti traces.
38

Top: Bow backs Stratford. Below: Balfron Low

This is the abandoned Olympic stadium, this is London 2013. A chance encounter, in the midst of a heat wave, London burns. Taking off. Occupation of space in multiple temporal zones. Projections into a dystopian future, harking back to a romanticised past, carving out territory in the present. ..stranded in the midst of abundant vegetation. The air is perfumed , the sky pink. My hair is loose, unkempt, I am in a red dress descending into the chlorine scent of a disused pool. Riot season begins.
39

LEARNING HOW TO DISAPPEAR:

my time with the Deptford Psychogeographical Association
by DAN TAYLOR

ime in the late-age was bound by rules, necessities: for a little while Id been working in a supermarket; before that, cleaning offices, bar-work, child-minding in the evenings. That was fine. Too tired to do anything else, hands raw and feet sore, my instincts quelled, I could pay the rent on my fifth floor Deptford bedsit and send a little money home. But when that kind of work dried up there was drink and little else. An archaic habit now, given how most citizens under the age of 40 were dependent on prescription drugs, but it did something else for me. It touched into a place I used to joke was freedom. The illegal stuff was too expensive or dangerous to take now that theyd closed up all the national borders, as well as the London security ring. When Id been working as a party performer/escort I had approved ID access to get into the City, at least then you could move around London. But this group of rich finance clients got way too hands-on one evening, and when I refused one guy broke my nose. Luckily I managed to get away before he could force his way further, but Id been blacklisted from performer work since. I was just the scrag end of pissed dockers and engineers passing through the south east district. Im racing ahead though, and for once this aint about me. This is about Ehud, and his nocturnal wanderings. Dark places. Boredom. Full-moon nights. Ehud was like me. He washed his hands obsessively, shaved and sprayed himself in fragrances at least twice a day. His shadow had twice the presence he did. Silent, lanky, hands fidgeting inside the pockets of his black Harrington jacket, short black hair, olive skin. Orderly. Almost normal. People thought we were sister and brother. He had CHRISTINE tattooed on the front of his neck above his Adams apple. Most of the people round this part of London had branded themselves in similar ways. Whether they enjoyed the pain of this self-modification or just the end of etching was a riddle to me. Yet why they chose Ehud as a specimen for the Department of Opportunity Social Refitting Programme wasnt that mysterious. Remove the tattoos, delete the nervous data of his twenty-something years, reboot his biopsyche and install a new successful programmed-persona, he could
40

Image by Andy Blundell, www.andyblundell.com

41

almost be normal. His mum had brought him and his brothers and sisters over from Israel when he was still very small. He said little about his family, or anything else for that matter, but there was little trace of any Israeli heritage, and he had converted to Islam in his early teens. His brother might be paid compensation for the compulsory takeover of his body, and most people would forget he ever existed. People were too messed up to be bothered, and besides, refitting had apparently demonstrated itself as such a successful social model. Take physically excellent types, usually of high fertility and immunity, but living either proletarian or sick lives, and forcibly replace their biopsychical data, usually with that of very successful businessmen, politicians, scientists and so on. A recipe for success. With the declining generation of new bodies making education irrelevant, this rather crude technique was celebrated by a cynical age for bringing back its great minds. Perhaps once again they might return us to the prosperity, freedom and happiness that lay just around the corner, if we waited just a little longer. - Hey you! - No! - Wait! - Shit! Id been drinking heavily another night, again out of boredom, with the media unit flickering away in the background, feeling bad.There were guys trying to contact me all night to have fun via the Network, but as much as I needed the money I wanted to stay on my own that night. I was thinking about cutting down my drugs again, but I had to see my Opportunity Worker in a couple of days and if I failed the regular urine test theyd cut off my account. There was nothing to swallow the pills down with so I shuffled out to the African grocers to get some more drink. After picking up vodka and beers I headed back up Deptford High Street where, just outside the old job centre, I saw this ratty bloke daubing these flyposters over the windows. He had headphones in, and with no-one else around he didnt spot me. The fly-posters were mostly black, though each one was different, with various photos of the butchers shops round the area, of the Department of Opportunity building, of Christopher Marlowes grave. On each poster there was a broad outline of an eye and a simple type logo that read DPA. The posters were obviously home-done, and the paper hed used was of a peculiar material that prevented it from sticking to the window for more than a minute. I leaned back against the railway bridge and slugged down the 100ml bottle of vodka, before watching him with great interest. I dont know what came over me, but I decided to throw the bottle at him. It shattered a meter or so behind him. Terrified, he ran. * New dawn. I skulked through the Deptford stink in search of breakfast and a place to pass some time. I saw him again later when I was queuing at the Department of Opportunity building in Catford. He was in the Medical Enquiries queue a few places ahead of me, still with those headphones in. Presumably like most people in the queue he was being tested for Form 52B Personal Capacity, with the obligatory 2 minute session on the DSM VII computerised diagnostic system. Afterwards followed the chat with your Opportunity
42

Worker and the urine-test to make sure youd taken all your anti-depressants, tranquillisers, behavioural management pills and the like. Later I spotted him again in the Jobseekers suite where the last few library books were stacked against a wall in a large windowless white room full of computers. The desks were peopled by middle-aged men and women scratching their heads, sneezing into the keyboards, slurping high-energy drinks and watching online music videos and porn whilst pretending to look for non-existent jobs on the Departmental website. He was rustling through a box of old history books stored in a fairly grubby medical waste crate. He was surprised that anyone even knew who he was. Every man is a toilet he said later, in his slightly stilted and deep Thames estuary drawl, sighing and folding his thin body into the blue formica seat of the Favorite Chicken shop. I hated this place but he insisted he only ate chicken or chips, never both, and that Deptford had the best fried chicken in the south-east district. I asked him about the DPA. - The Deptford Psychogeographical Association. - What? - Ah its a long story. I was on one of them flippin Opportunity Community Choice schemes, we was clearing out gutters and dead peoples flats and shit. Nasty stuff. Well this old guy was there and was tellin me all this business to do with Guy Debord and these French guys who used to just walk around innit. We used to bunk off, skin up and roll around the area while he told me all this stuff, about knowing and seeing the area. I know this area. Im from these ends. But I never knew the secret impressions the buildings make on you, the old buildings you see and what they were used for. All kinds of secrets, you know. Its about your emotions, and the spirits yeah.You see, I cant sleep. I dunno if its these pills they give me for my concentration but I cant sleep, so I just walk around and I feel the place innit. The ghosts. The angels. When the wind cools on Evelyn Road or the high street you hear this shit, all the voices and sadness of the dock-workers, or the Navy men with their scurvy-up teeth and missing legs of the girls who killed cows like 24/7 at the British Empire Cattle Market.Their lives were tough like ours, but they couldnt escape it. In the end me and this guy thought wed take it further wed try and record and save these peoples lives. - I dont get you. - Well you dont have to get it. Theres plenty of people doing it. Theres other people like me who cant sleep. We go together innit. Loads of us. Only at night, after curfew, when the Justice men arent around and we can move around a bit more. We moved Christopher Marlowes grave to where it should be and no-one even noticed. Weve renamed some of the streets as well, but the Police arrested Femi and Harris, the old guy I was telling you about, and Femi just disappeared, so we aint doing that for the time being. - Ok, but whats this psychogeography though? That just a nice word for walking around at night when you got nothing better to do? - Ha, maybe. You should come though. What is your name? - Meliha. Its Turkish. - I am Ehud, by the way. Ehud was sick, like most people in the district. He couldnt sleep and spent the nocturnal hours wandering through the area. Eventually through idling around in the Department of
43

Opportunity we met other addicts and insomniacs compelled to walk and drink together, photograph locations as crime-scenes, take notes and recordings. It was essential that nothing was available online. For that purpose, on that first experiment I joined them on, we all got drunk (like eight of us in total) before breaking in to the old Job Centre to establish our first archive space. Later I realised he was a bit manic when I had first met him for much of the time after he was subdued, mercurial. After the first few experiments I kept my distance a little, joining in when Ehud told me thered be some drinking or maybe some violence involved, like Ehuds crazed idea of crashing a car full of radio equipment, binary-jammers and antennae into the entrance of the Department of Justice station on Amersham Vale in order to sabotage their psychic hold over Deptford. That was a laugh. After spending some time together, Ehud finally surrendered one of his childish obsessive prejudices and began to drink alcohol with me. From then on we drank together a lot. I taught him how to play othello and backgammon, old games my Nanna knew. I was bored and curious, and one night after quite a session we took things further. His entire body was covered in these self-etched tattoos, of binary code like 10101011 all across his arms and legs, and other weird symbols, some of which I recognised from the digital keyboard. He was surprised I didnt have any, but I needed to keep clean for work. It was a standard for men to try and finish as quickly as possible with legalised sex-workers in order to save money on the hours system introduced by the state. But this was nice. Afterwards, as a kind of joke, I asked him if Christine minded, but he just stared straight through me. * Otherwise my own life was starting to get out of control. The DSM VII computer programme had put me on a stronger course of behavioural reassignment pills, but the problem was that prescription drugs themselves were becoming harder and harder to obtain. Since the closure of the borders and the London security ring around the M25, it was impossible to bring through any illegal drugs. The other fact was that no-one was interested in illegal drugs now that the prescription drugs available were so much more powerful. Anti-depressants were used to treat criminal behaviour, meaning that you never really saw violence except by those few people not on the drugs, but there was a growing black market for them. Organised gangs had been targeting the drug company convoys, and so this time round Deptford was near-dry, meaning people were having to get their painkillers in the betting shops and takeaways. It was a summer afternoon, rich with that hazy and heavy luminescence that sticks sweat to skin and drives colour into fever. Feeling sick of it all, I was queuing at the pharmacy for whatever emergency supplies they had for my English Nanna. She needed her immunity meds and her Alzheimers pills. Auto-immune diseases were striking down a lot of the population, and aside from personality disorders like mine and Ehuds were the main cause of the high unemployment of the London outer districts. They began like allergies but just persisted. Painkillers and ointments could be used to treat them at least in the short term. But I didnt want to end up like that. Greasy and fetid mattresses were piling up in the derelict car-parks.
44

On my way back to my Nannas, I passed the boarded up school, but this time I could smell smoke and hear shouting from inside. Any kind of human noise was pretty unusual compared to the consistent speech and projections of the multimedia advertisements stacked all over the district. Curious, I ventured inside the now unlocked school entrance, through an old dusty corridor, through to what must have been an inner courtyard where the shouting was coming from. I saw a group of girls and boys shouting and laughing. Two boys lifted up an old media unit and threw it onto the raging fire burning through the pyre of piled fridges, radiators, old books and media boxes. They couldnt see me, so content were these strange children within themselves. I wandered home, feeling dizzy and feverish. I was very sick for a long time after. I dont think I left my bedsit for at least a couple of weeks. I had enough water and painkillers, and my sister came over after a week to look after me. Imprisoned by vicious labyrinthine dreams. I lost my eyesight for a little while. * The DPA was becoming more and more active, taking over some of the local shops, organising literacy sessions and community work. Rosa and Harris were largely leading it now and its original and more occult bent was disappearing. As had Ehud. I asked Rosa if shed seen him at all recently, but thered been no sign of him for weeks. From checking through his contact ID I knew where he lived, so that afternoon I brought over a couple of large bottles of drinking water after another local shortage. I dressed up. I was looking forward to seeing him now I felt healthy again. He lived on the third floor of a block round Prince Street. I had never been to his place before, and when he opened the door with a confused look on his face it reminded me how remote he was. He lived with his brother, who spoke (and spoke over us) for the most part. -You his girlfriend yeah? Well you know hes been selected by Opportunity to be refitted right? - No I didnt.... - Well its an honour. Youre a good specimen arent you bruv? Apparently he looks a bit like this first chairmen of one of the data companies, Apple or something. They shoulda picked me! But dont worry, this moneys gonna help us out. And youll have a better life than just taking your pills round here. Youre going to be happy bruv. Just a small thing. You wont notice when youre going, and then youre someone different. I think wed all do it if we could, have a free life and be rich. Ehud was silent the whole time, and though Id brought some wine over he asked me not to stay. A few days later I called again but he was gone.Then I got a letter from him, posted from Harwich in Essex. It didnt make much sense, but it seemed like hed been refitted it was largely brief, but written and then scribbled out was STEVE followed by his real name EHUD. There was so much sadness in that letter. I had to see what theyd done. * Morning, a time Id hardly known in recent years.There were no coaches out of the city for those with limited access, but it was easy enough to jump over the walls at one the more obscure suburbs like at Brickkiln Wood in the east, as presumably Ehud had done. From there on I headed to Billericay, then avoiding the motorways I tracked through the fields
45

and minor roads to Maldon, before heading onto Mersea Island in the evening, where I found some trees and a hedgerow in the north part of the island to sleep under for the night. I had a rough map and I aimed to get to Harwich where I figured he might still be. It was the first-time Id seen or smelt life outside the city. The paths were muddy but not like ordinary city mud this was golden soil, the air smelt of fresh, crisp and somehow invigorating shit, and smoke from the large tractor units that rolled the wheat around the late summer fields. I hadnt expected anything from this journey, but my mind replayed endless conversations with him, things I should have said, even small silly things about my life, about my upbringing, whether he believed in anything at all. Perhaps the first day of my life. Birdsong scattered in an infinity of directions, each call and response describing new moments of experience I had yet to discover. The breeze tickled my shoulders, and the sun flickered through the embrace of the hedge which was so comfortable, tricking my closed eyes with all types of shapes beneath my eyelids. I woke up and walked around the surprisingly small field in my bare feet, letting the slightly damp soil wriggle in between my toes. I found a supermarket in Wivenhoe and bought some vodka and cheese rolls. I followed the coastline for the rest of the day, reaching Harwich in the late afternoon. Id still been thinking of our reunion as I walked along would he remember who he was? Refitted individuals were usually moved somewhere completely different in order to avoid the danger of regression, and the media channels rarely discussed the process except in criminological contexts to describe its social benefits. Maybe we were all in some way refitted. Ehuds refitting had clearly gone wrong in some capacity. No data from his old biopsyche should have remained, but he was so bound to the poxy and grey part of the south-east district we both shared that rambling out of the city was entirely out of keeping with his obsessive behaviour. His letter was uncharacteristically lucid, compared to most of his words, which usually began with inscrutable observations and had little personal bearing on anything remotely tangential. He even personally addressed it to me. He spoke of techno-biological knowledge, that time had been used as a weapon against us and that this way of living was a daily death. While the media units projected a world of war and disaster there might be others out there who could help reclaim the technology that he had personally created, and which had fallen into the wrong hands. No-one was told who hed been refitted and replaced with, but the Department of Opportunity and their financial backers may have wanted to get him back and get a return their investment. They may have wanted to kill him, or maybe this was the punishment already inflicted: their motives were fathomless. I finally reached the small town outside of Harwich where his letter had been written. The town itself was nothing much to look at however. Several whitewashed and pebble-dashed bungalows jutted against the fatigued estuary, barnacled in satellite dishes and St. Georges flags, with piles of lager and meat curry cans scattered on the patios pierced through with scrawny weeds and dilapidated people. One arterial road sunk through this town twinned with nowhere, drive carefully, a boarded up school, absolute silence and the stale sweat of frustration.There was a closed newsagent with a postbox where Ehud may have posted the letter, a declining and archaic
46

medium used generally by the state and advertisers. He had been here, but where was he now? In the distance, just by the road that exited the village, was a country pub that offered rooms for the night. - Yeah there was a weird bloke who came in last night, coming to think of it. He looked a bit Arabic, you know. Well we wouldve, but it wouldve upset some of our customers. - Where did he go after? - No. I mean, yes. But I dont know where he went. - What else is round here? - Just the beach and the old docks and fair. Theres Felixstowe across the bay. - - Do you want to leave your contact ID in case he calls back? I found the path, but with no help from the gawping locals or that sweaty and pervy man who ran the pub. I didnt even check for a room, I was so tired and getting angry. I had no money anyway. My Opportunity Worker would be wondering why Id not shown up for my appointment today. The sun was already setting, burning through the heavy and languorous sky with rich burnished golden intensity, with a hum of peach and lavender emanating around it. The pewter sea extended to infinity. Somehow that concept gave me a little hope. I found the coastal path and reached the beach, following the pebbly coast northwards towards the bright lights of the docks. The sky was quickly transforming into a pale indigo cooled by the evening breeze and the distant cry of the gulls and the waves. After perhaps half an hour of this evening stroll there was still no sign of Ehud. The coastline began to snake round inward to the left, with the dock lights bearing brighter and bolder. A shadow up by the rocks at the end of the beach caught my eye, and I ventured over. There were the remains of a fire, now cool, some empty beer cans and plastic sandwich packaging, his jacket, and folded inside his jeans and his shoes, and inside his right shoe his socks and pants, and inside the left a t-shirt and some money.The air was still now, and the night was rejoicing in a feast of stars. The beach didnt quite end there. On the other side of the rocks were some old fishing boats stacked up. I managed to wrest one and its oars from their dusty stupor and drag it down to the fastly-ebbing tide. THE BLUEBELL 314 FELIXSTOWE. After a minute of gently rocking while the seagulls clamoured on, the boat seemed seaworthy. I slung my belongings into the vessel, sinking the vodka before chucking the empty bottle back onto the shore.This time I did catch Ehuds coat. Gently, against the heavy moon I embarked out North, angelically weaving between two Maersk super-container ships. The men shouted, but for once, perhaps, I was free, heading nowhere and everywhere. Maybe this nightmare of God had temporarily become something in a small way good. Maybe he had made it across, to the other side. There was only one way of knowing. Sick of spectatorship, I rowed with all my heart knowing there could not possibly be any way back.

47

PEPSI MAX MANHOOD

by NICHOLAS E. GLEDHILL The human race, if we are to follow the authorities, have in the course of the ages developed three such systems of thought three great pictures of the universe : animistic (or mythological), religious and scientific. Of these, animism, the first to be created, is perhaps the one which is most consistent and exhaustive and which gives a truly complete explanation of the nature of the universe. . . . It would go beyond our present purpose to show how much of it still persists in modern life, either in the debased forms of superstition or as the living basis of our speech, our beliefs and our philosophies. Freud, Totem and Taboo Myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him. Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning

48

n a recent television commercial for Pepsi Max, a young man is sitting in a bar trying to attract the attention of a beautiful woman. He offers to buy her a drink, and she turns him down. We can see right away what the situation is. He is besotted, but she isnt interested in him. Shes way out of his league. Just another loser, we cant help thinking, as an age-old clich is played out before us for the millionth time. But wait, perhaps this time things will be different? Suddenly, on a television screen behind the bar, a news flash. The clientele fall silent. A reporter, clearly distressed, is explaining that an enormous meteorite is about to hit the earth. Life as we know it will be exterminated within minutes. After a moment of stunned silence, as if to confirm what we dared not believe, the bartender leaps onto the counter screaming Were all gonna die! Panic ensues. The bar empties. Except that is, for our lonely Romeo and his reluctant Juliet. He looks at her again, questioningly, and this time as she returns his gaze her eyes seem to say Well, what the hey? Im about to die anyway, so I may as well spend my last moments rutting like an animal on the filthy floor of this bar with some stranger. As we all know, this is the standard, rational response to the onset of Armageddon. When the worlds about to end, sexual politics is suspended. You just fuck whoever happens to be closest to you. Those are the rules. And, sure enough, the pair promptly tumble to the floor in a passionate embrace. We cut to another scene. Presumably its a bit later on and, surprise surprise, the world hasnt ended after all. And whats this? Our plucky hero from the bar, plus the excitable bartender, plus the reporter from the news flash are all together, celebrating. How is this possible? We are amazed. Around the trio are strewn the paraphernalia of an amateurish film

shoot: camera, tripod, backdrop showing meteorite looming in sky, etc., all in what looks suspiciously like the back room of a bar. Hang on a minute . . . suddenly it dawns on us: its all been a ruse! The whole news flash thing was bogus, a set-up, a cunning ploy to get our hero a bit of no-strings sex with the girl of his dreams. How audacious! How ingenious! And above all, we find ourselves thinking, what breathtaking camaraderie; what devotion from this mans two friends, who have gone to such great lengths just to help him satisfy his peccadilloes. What fine mates he has. What an unsurpassed crew. Whats more, it is clear that through his conquest all three have achieved a kind of victory, a mutual accomplishment, like when the star quarterback scores a touchdown but the whole team wins the game. They dance a victory dance. Highfives all round. It is truly touching. And now, as we smile at their antics, can we help but wonder at what other hilarious scrapes they must habitually get themselves into, these dive bar musketeers? What kind of enthralling tapestry of high-spirited feats, joie de vivre and endless male bonding must the lives of these handsome young fellows be? How can our dull-as-shit lives on the other side of the TV screen ever, possibly, measure up? Is there some kind of secret formula that theyre using? Some kind of magical elixir perhaps, that will impart upon us mere drones the self-confidence, energy and inspiration necessary to carry out operations on the scale of that to which we have just borne witness? Triumphantly, they each crack open a Pepsi Max. * What are we to make of this gem from the world of advertising? Surely it goes without saying that none of its audience, not even the credulous teenage boys at which it is presumably targeted, actually believe
49

that Pepsi Max1 has any real capacity to magically empower its consumers. Not in the same way they would believe that, say, Paris is the capital of France, or 2 + 2 = 4. Surely the 21st Century audience accepts, on some level at least, that advertising like this is basically nonsense. Whats curious is not whether people are taken in by the fantastical claims of manufacturers for their products but rather that the truth or falsity of these claims, on a literal level, doesnt really matter any more at all. We are, if you like, caught in a kind of psychological ritual. As soon as we turn on our TV we disavow, like the Lacanian fetishist, our knowledge of how things really are and give free reign to our fantasies: je sais bien, mais quand meme . . . But whose exactly are these fantasies? Where do they come from? As we gradually lose our grip on reality, perhaps we should question whats being foisted on us, by whom, and for what reason. The events in our Pepsi Max commercial take place in an alternative world. Obviously were not supposed to take it seriously, so we suspend disbelief and play along. But its a world that were increasingly exposed to and which is becoming impossible to avoid, as it permeates more and more of the environment we inhabit.We are surrounded by windows into it. Its a world of audacious deeds, like the ones outlined above. Its a world where everything falls into place. Its a world where anything can happen, a world of super powers, wizards, aliens and vampires. Its a world of immeasurably greater possibilities than our own, in which we are constantly encouraged to immerse ourselves. It mirrors our own world, yet its a world that is plastic, endlessly malleable, irresistible, mesmerising. A world of symbols, its free from the physical and logical restraints that confound us in our actual lives. This is the hyperreality that so
50

obsessed Baudrillard: more real than the real . . . acting as a lure to which the force of myth is attached (2006: 81). Levi-Strauss once wrote that history had replaced mythology in our societies and fulfilled the same function (2001: 36). Perhaps he got it wrong. After all, who cares about history any more? Didnt that end in about 1989? Instead, we behold the myths of our age every time we look into a screen. Under the auspices of this fantasy zone Pepsi Max can be represented as something far greater than it actually is, and this hyperrealised version of it quickly becomes more relevant to its value than its actual existence in reality. What could be more prosaic than an actual can of Pepsi? Its the dream that sells, and the advertisers of this product are basically encouraging us to buy into a myth. It is possible to frame this in some of the same terms used by anthropologists studying magic in primitive societies. In its advertising, Pepsi Max is presented as endowing something like the magical force usually known as Mana. Ostensibly an inert substance, it in fact sympathetically imparts upon its users a form of mystical power, enabling them to achieve great feats. Its like a magic sword, a talisman, a ring of power. Even when Pepsi Max is not physically present we can see that it acts upon its devotees, guiding them, inspiring them: a kind of ether, imponderable, incommunicable, which spreads of its own accord . . . produced in a closed circuit in which everything is mana and which is itself mana (Mauss, 2001: 138). When we watch this advert, what were being invited to do is enter a particular zone of hyperreality which is in the grip of the mana of Pepsi Max. For the sake of convenience, lets call this place Pepsi Max Reality, or PMR. Within PMR we also have some contingent concepts, such as Pepsi

the whole news flash thing was bogus, a set-up, a cunning ploy to get our hero a bit of no-strings sex with the girl of his dreams. How audacious! How ingenious! And above all, we find ourselves thinking, what breathtaking camaraderie

Max Woman (PMW) and, of course, Pepsi Max Man (PMM). Crucially, a fundamental aspect of the mana of Pepsi Max is that the power it imparts is exclusively masculine. This renders PMR a kind of phallic zone, in which reality is tailored entirely to PMMs needs, and everything that takes place in PMR does so in a fog of sweat and testosterone. Just like powerful cars, razors and Yorkie bars, Pepsi Max is symbolic of all things male. Girls simply do not drink Pepsi Max. Pepsi Max is everything girls arent. Its tough, virile, focused and single-minded. It knows what it wants, and how to get it. The bearer of a can of Pepsi Max, we are encouraged to believe, is a certain type of Man (with a capital M) and what were really being sold is the aspirational myth of Him. What kind of man is he, this Pepsi Max Man? Are we right to idolise him? There are reasons we should be worried. Firstly, and most disturbingly, it is clear that there is something especially jarring about this particular advert. Havent we just witnessed a rape? It certainly seems that in PMR a form of rape, at least one involving complex psychological coercion if not outright physical force, is not only acceptable but also openly encouraged.2 Clearly, PMW is not interested in sex with PMM until she is tricked by him into believing that the world is about to come to a sudden, violent end. The resulting psychological trauma apparently compels her into an act that we, as viewers, know

she wouldnt have been willing to engage in under normal circumstances (we have already seen how she rejects PMMs earlier advances). All along, PMM is well aware of the truth of the situation. Not only this, but the whole thing is pre-meditated, intricately planned and carried out with ruthless sangfroid. Suddenly, a lot of difficult questions are beginning to arise about what kind of place PMR is. Is there AIDS in PMR? Could PMW be pregnant? More disturbingly, has PMM done this kind of thing before? Could he and his two buddies actually be a gang of unusually inventive serial sexual predators? They certainly look like they know what theyre doing. Are there any police in PMR, and shouldnt somebody call them? The overall message is loud and clear: It is right and proper for PMM to try to fuck PMW whenever he can, willing or unwilling, by whatever means necessary, and furthermore it is the duty of his friends (his PMFs) not only to condone this behaviour but to actively assist him in it, wherever possible. The mana of Pepsi Max can help them do this. As well as being a rapist, Pepsi Max Man is also remarkable in that he has no conscience. He is entirely motivated by the gratification of his own desires, untroubled by any possible consequences. PMM lives in the moment, and his goals are short-term. To facilitate this, the mana of Pepsi Max dispenses with useless traits like guilt and sympathy, replacing them instead
51

Image by Julia Scheele: www.juliascheele.co.uk

with cunning, guile and a steely resolve. PMM is basically a psychopath. Hell stop at nothing to get what he wants, and have no trouble sleeping afterwards, but what about PMW? It isnt difficult for us to imagine how she might be feeling, later on, as she peels herself off the beer-stained floor and realises shes been duped and violated by a man she wouldnt normally spit on. However, the fact is that to PMM the inner life of PMW is of no relevance. She is an object. Her only role is to provide PMM with a goal, a challenge through which he can demonstrate the powers imparted on
52

him by Pepsi Max. In fact, to all intents and purposes PMW ceases to exist immediately after her role is played out, disappearing instantly from the narrative without a trace. No sooner has PMW surrendered her dignity than shes cast aside, like an empty can, consigned forever to a hyperreal limbo of obscurity as the sly bastard boogies into the night with his leering accomplices. Perhaps shell survive as a notch on a bedpost somewhere, or maybe PMM has kept an item of her clothing as a grisly trophy like the serial killers do in CSI. Who knows? PMWs work is done as soon as

What kind of enthralling tapestry of high-spirited feats, joie de vivre and endless male bonding must the lives of these handsome young fellows be? How can our dull-as-shit lives on the other side of the TV screen ever, possibly, measure up?

she puts out, and after that shes of no interest whatsoever. What else are women good for anyway? In fact, who cares about what happens to other people in general as long as you get what you want, any way you can and now. PMM is a grown man in a state of permanent childhood. Hes on a kind of perpetual Lord of the Flies island, in a Hobbesian state of nature in which hes free from authority or responsibility of any kind. As a result hes manipulative, uncaring, selfish, and misogynistic.3 What kind of messages should we read into this? Implicit

within it are far-reaching political assertions that seem to be taken for granted. And perhaps most worryingly of all, PMM is just one example of a new breed of young male characters that have become depressingly familiar in recent years. He is cut from the same cloth as the likes of WKD Lad, Carling Bloke and Lynx-Effect Guy. They live together in roughly the same zone of hyperreality, a bit like virtual neighbours, probably meeting up for a drink every now and then, lending each other porn DVDs and impressively hi-tech bits of barbecuing equipment. Theyre basically the
53

Pepsi Max Womans work is done as soon as she puts out, and after that shes of no interest whatsoever. What else are women good for anyway? In fact, who cares about what happens to other people in general as long as you get what you want, any way you can and now.

male counterparts of the girls that Natasha Walter laments as signifying a resurgence of sexism, girls who long to conform to banal, prescribed notions of femininity, love pink clothes and shopping and want to grow up to be like Bratz dolls (Walter, 2010: 64). In his way, PMM is just as helplessly determined by preconceived attitudes towards gender identity, and beneath his bluster he is just as pathetic, just as vacuous, ingenuous and disenfranchised. He just doesnt know it. And, as he parties on like a pig in filth, ignorant, de-politicised, and only concerned with what he can get, he makes a perfect person to sell stuff to. Because in PMR everything is for sale, everything a commodity to be acquired and used, especially PMW, while all the time looming over everything there is the Deity, the Dark God, the irresistible vortex of The Product, without which Pepsi Max Man is nothing. This is beyond sexism. The subtle emergence and acceptance of this Pepsi Max version of manhood is an indicator of a growing cultural turn, which signifies
54

the degradation of an entire generation of people, male and female alike. It is a harbinger of a new, atomised, savage version of society, in which identification with products is presented as the key to power and freedom and any human relationships other than those of transaction or manipulation are irrelevant. Its kill or be killed, use or be used. PMM doesnt see PMW as a fellow human being but as quarry, as prey, as an opponent to be defeated, a target to be struck. The victory dance of the Pepsi Max Men is primal, it is atavistic. It is a celebration of the dormant instincts of a more brutal, more terrifying age. It is the unbridled, primitive joy of conquest, of male sexuality as a weapon, of the enemy brought to its knees, broken and humiliated, of fire and blood, of burned villages and howling, parentless children, of going out into the deep dark forest and finally bagging that particularly bothersome stag.

REFERENCES Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University Press, 2006 Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961 Levi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge, 2001 Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic. London: Routledge, 2001 Walter, Natasha. Living Dolls The Return of Sexism. London: Virago, 2010 NOTES 1. A product which, much like Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke and the marvellously named Coke Zero, is remarkable in being a comestible actually marketed on the fact that it contains no nutritional value whatsoever, a kind of liquid chewing gum. More of an absence than a thing, it could be seen as the ultimate in commodity fetishism. 2. In fact, the Advertising Standards Authority did receive complaints about this ad, along the lines that it condoned rape and was demeaning to women. However, these were rejected by the ASA on the grounds that the ad was obviously fantastical and could clearly not be imitated by viewers. So, its okay because its lies. 3. Note also that PMM is a young, attractive, heterosexual white man. Would the sinister rapey elements of the ad have been less palatable if it had depicted an overweight, buck-toothed PMM trying the same tactics? What about a much older PMM and a much younger PMW? What about three black PMMs and a white PMW? We all know that theres no way Pepsi would have commissioned this. What does this tell us about PMR? Although it is, on the one hand, shockingly permissive (for PMM at least), many other aspects of it are in fact oddly strict. Fascist, even. The advert can be viewed on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khm97C2j6aA

55

BonesEast boneseast.blogspot.com

by RICHARD HAMILTON
On the bus, atop the bus stop, in the train, in the gutter, in shop doors, next to the bin (never quite inside), on public seats, in garden beds.You name the spot, you will find a chicken bone

56

y dozy afternoon is soon shattered as I hear some heavy clomping up the first set of wooden stairs. Normally there would be a few minutes of activity on the first floor and a bit of chatter, but straight away the next rung of steps up to my room is hastily climbed. Richard, are you here? I groggily reply an affirmative return, as if Ive been active and tasking all day. Well there are some really disgusting chicken remains in Voss Street. Quick, get your camera. This is a typical day for me. In between my few days a week work are scattered daily missions around Bethnal Green, Hackney and Shoreditch to find, what for me is the great totem of East End consumption: chicken bones. Fried chicken is a staple of east London. It is the new baked beans, albeit with less nourishment. While Im not a big eater of the local delicacy, I just love trawling the streets to find the run-over remnants of a group of kids after-school snacks. There is something beautiful about it; each new find is like a pot of gold. The first thing that comes to mind is: How can I exploit this discarded snack? BonesEast started after some drunken ramblings and walks between bars with a pack of four unrelated Hamiltons. A year later, after most had moved on beyond London, I decided to document the chicken

bones cult, appearing in mythic and totemic configurations throughout the whole East End. On the bus, atop the bus stop, in the train, in the gutter, in shop doors, next to the bin (never quite inside), on public seats, in garden beds. You name the spot, you will find a chicken bone, stripped of its flesh (by human or ant) somewhere in the vicinity. Everywhere you look you can see a chicken delight store, but its the discarded remains that mark the mythic extent of this guzzling. When I moved into Voss Street, just south of Bethnal Green Road, I never thought it would become the start of BonesEast. Every day on my way to work or Tesco, or just on a dusk trawl for bones with my flatmates, Id find a new box of scraps or a squished family-sized bucket. It was as if the chicken gods knew I resided there, and were either punishing me, or gracing me with the best material they could fry up. I later realised Voss Street was the after school haunt for poultry-hungry teens. The weeks leading up to my departure from London, en route to Berlin, I struggled to find any ripper trash to photograph. My expectations were too high after undertaking this hobby for five months. There were wings and legs everywhere, but to me the myth had gone. BonesEast will return as soon as I make it back to east London to get a three-piece feed with a side of inspiration. >>>>
57

METAMORPHOSIS
byTHEODORE REEVES-EVISON

STAGES OF

The seed, dormant in the simian since birth, sends out shoots that grow up the digestive tract until they find their opening at the anus.
58

oughly two weeks prior to metamorphosis the simian will bleed from the nose at regular intervals. When the nosebleed becomes continuous he will leave the group and find a clearing in the forest in which the metamorphosis can take place. In this clearing, the simian will squat, arms bent backwards , touching the ground.

The simians fingers will physically extend into the ground over the course of two to three days, forming a lateral spread of roots beneath the soil. When the root network is able to support the simians weight, with some effort, he will pull his body into a horizontal position, bend his knees toward his chest, and extend his legs and body up into the air. The simian will enter a stage of internal transformation. His veins and arteries will be emptied of their blood and start to transport water; his stomach will burst and release its acid into the abdominal cavity, dissolving the vital organs directly below. The simians heart will remain intact throughout the metamorphosis, retaining its function as a pump in order to power the vascular network. The simian will physically shrink. Outer layers of skin will begin to crack and dry out. From within the abdominal cavity a seed will begin to grow. The seed, dormant in the simian since birth, sends out shoots that grow up the digestive tract until they find their opening at the anus. The aorta connects itself to the root network, nourishing the seed as it grows. The simians body is no longer recognizable. His legs have withered away and what was once a shoot is now a sapling imperceptibly joined to the simians abdomen. Branches spread to fill the forest clearing.

59

The answer given through the Luther Blissett project was different: it became necessary to invent a new practice of collective myth-making from below. And the myth that was created was Luther Blissett.

n 7 November 1994, L.B., allegedly a researcher from University of Missouri, put his initials to an article On surprising uses of the multiple name Luther Blissett around the world, which appeared shortly afterwards on Usenet. From its clumsy English, uncannily similar to that of the present writer, one might infer that the writer was Italian, and that the article was a weak prank. Nevertheless, between 1994 and 1998 the Luther Blissett project became an incredibly radical and widespread phenomenon not only in Italy but also in France and in Spain. Luther Blissett became a multiuse pseudonym and political strategy that could be adopted by anyone interested in contributing to the subversive reputation of an imaginary Robin Hood-like character, allegedly the virtual leader of an open community thriving on media scams, myth-making, seditious writings, radical performance art and culture jamming. It emerged from a fine line of semiotic terrorism and collective identity deception, with Karen Eliot and Monty Cantsin being used to similar effect. In the words of the Luther Blissett Manifesto featured in Stewart Homes Mind Invaders, a veritable collection of myths of the near future: Anyone can be Luther Blissett simply by adopting the name Luther Blissett.
60

In order to understand the practice of the Luther Blissett project one has only to recall the ailing fortunes of AC Milan in the early 1980s. In 1983, AC Milan attempted a controversial operation: in getting rid of one of the best Italian scorers of the time, it bought a little known Jamaican player for the incredible sum of 1 million. In the following year, Luther Blissett played 30 games scoring only 5 times. He was accused of actively sabotaging AC Milan and of attempting to bring the club to its knees. After one fantastic year, the Jamaican was sold back to Watford at a loss of half a million pounds. Yet Blissett appeared cheerful after being given the sack, famously complaining: No matter how much money you have here, you cant seem to get Rice Krispies. Strange suppositions were whispered in every dark corner of every Italian bar. It was variously suggested that an embarrassing mistake had been made by AC Milan, which really intended to buy the other black player of Watford City, a guy called John Barnes, who seemed to play much better football. Others were convinced that Blissett knew from the very beginning that he would have been given the sack at the end of the year and decided to have some fun playing in the most inept and preposterous way possible. Whatever the truth, Luther Blissett was already a myth,

Myth-making at the extreme borders of Empire by Luther Blissett

61

New monstrous mythologies are already taking form at the chaotic borders of our decadent empire; the emperors mythologists are drumming their call to war from every corner. While singing of the timeless struggle of good versus evil, they project new enemies, and they construct new heroes. Complacency is defeat...

the black cipher of cheerful sabotage. Ten years later a collective of writers, artists, flneurs and unemployed pseudo-students hijacked his name in order to continue the show. In 1994, hundreds of European artists, activists and pranksters adopted and shared the same identity.They all called themselves Luther Blissett and set to raising hell in the cultural industry. It was a five-year plan. These Robin Hoods of the Information age waged a guerilla warfare on the cultural industry, ran unorthodox solidarity campaigns for victims of censorship and repression and above all played elaborate media pranks as a form of art, always claiming responsibility and explaining what bugs they had exploited to plant a fake story. Luther Blissett became an extremely popular phenomenon and a legend with the reputation of a folk hero. The meaning of the Luther Blissett project was to recuperate mythological forms of thinking in reaction to the decadent rationalism of the Italian Left and the effective mythological expressionism of the far Right. In the figure of the illegal migrant, the Italian Right was able to create a mythological enemy responsible for all the evils of modern industrial societies. All the rapes, killings, thefts, inequalities and injustices were to be attributed to this mythological figure: the illegal migrant, and today, increasingly conflated with the terrorist. Confronted by the horror of this mythology, the Left answered with traditional calls to rationality, to sociological analysis, to critical thinking. All good and meritorious stuff, but the cultural form
62

represented by mythological thinking could not be left to the new fascist forces of conservatism. The answer given through the Luther Blissett project was different: it became necessary to invent a new practice of collective myth-making from below. And the myth that was created was Luther Blissett. Many centuries ago, the English peasantry rebelled against the Norman nobles that had expropriated their land and forced them into an exploitative hierarchy of feudalism. A multitude of uncoordinated actions of class warfare originated in the poors demand for food and freedom. The bards knitted them together and gave them the face and body of a mythological figure: Robin Hood. For some years in the 1990s, Luther Blissetts activities were ubiquitous. He was house-squatting and mediahijacking; he was involved in nomadic Roman raves and collective writing projects in Bologna. And the movement grew together with the myth of its implacability. For a Luther Blissett who was caught and fined by the metropolitan police, a thousand of them were already planning their way out of boredom in a condo flat in Pescara, or in a student collective in Genova. The final objective, then and now, is to deconstruct and negate the individual identity on which the injunctions of the law operate in order to have some fun, have some freedom and participate in a collective process of the transformation of reality. As the reactionary Nazi-hero Ernst Jnger dared to write: The myth will

This is not Luther Blissett!

not fail to re-emerge, indeed, it is coming already. In reality its always been here, and will come to surface as a treasure at the opportune moment. It will come, however, as a heterogeneous principle, when its very process will reach the highest level. We never go back to the myth, we always find it again whenever the foundations of time are shaken by the threat of an extreme danger. New monstrous mythologies are already taking form at the chaotic borders of our decadent empire; the emperors mythologists are drumming their call to war from every corner. While singing of the timeless struggle of good versus evil, they project new enemies, and they construct new heroes. Complacency is defeat: Chernyshevskys plea to action, chto delat? (what is to be done?) resonates even more clearly today.The Luther Blissett project suggests new forms of myth-making as resistance. Useless to say, together with Barthes and Cassirer, that power never ceases to speak; the mythical machine, in Agamben and Jesis terms, never ceases to spin. The Left, tied to the mast of rationality, listens and denounces the sirens of Capital

but seems increasingly unable to respond. Almost a century ago Sorel evoked the myth of the general strike to keep the hopes of revolution alive, to touch hearts and minds, and to avoid the normalizing power of the biopolitical. For all its continued potency, we may not wish to pin our hopes on the general strike or in the fervour of revolution; we need to find new images and new myths for new political practices. But the question remains: should we untie the knots that bind our bodies and our creativity to the mast and start singing our own mythical songs? Should we leave Ulysses and follow Orpheus in our struggle to resist the alluring singing of the sirens dwelling in the mythical machine? How can we reconstruct the possibility of myth-making as a collective project capable of bringing forth images and metaphors for continued political action in the face of repeated failure? And how can we avoid witnessing these poetical ruptures being once more recuperated, bent and neutralized by power? What we need, is at once a theory, a political myth and a practice of myth-making.

63

THE BIG SOCIETY: WESTERN

by RIDDLE GRAVE AND SYLVAIN POPINJAY

64

SCENE 1. OUR HERO RETURNS. The nights are long in the country, too long for a man like Karl Hero. The people of the new towns had at first hungered for his message of revolutionary emancipation, cheering especially noisily and sloshing their lager around when he denounced the antics of the evil capitalists. They were less enthused when he called on them to unite together as a class and take over the means of production, As Karl preached the gospel of universal emancipation to half-populated pub car-parks, the locals wrestled with one another, poured beer over each others heads and scratched insults into the windscreens of cars. Perhaps London would be more welcoming. Karls tongue ran across his bottom lip as he scanned the desolate M25 servicestation car-park, his faithful Ducatti purring back into lifelessness. His nostrils flared with the scent of gasoline and the social effects of microwave dinners. It was a Friday evening. The Entertainment Park was full of obese families gobbling down fried chicken, jabbing their mobile phones and arguing with one another. He hadnt eaten for days. Out of desperation he swaggered through the automated doors of Perfect Fried Chicken, all eyes suddenly turning towards him in his black motorbike leathers, with the various hand-drawn patches of Lenin and Bakunin roughly sewn on, as well as the multicoloured insignia of the south European Communist branches hed passed through. Karl strolled insolently towards the counter and grabbed a large piece of breaded chicken moments before it reached the slobbering mouth of a ruddyfaced trucker. The vegetable oil tasted so fine. With his other hand he plucked the newspaper from under the shocked mans eyes. Karl read on an open page: We need a more authoritative world.

Weve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say Whats the alternative to democracy? There isnt one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.1 Thats my bloody chicken you cheeky ---- ! But it was too late. Karl was gone. SCENE 2. BANDITOS HAVE SEIZED BRITAIN. Britain was once a peaceful and nice place, with lots of liberal values and that kind of thing. But that was before all this. Now packs of capitalist banditos have taken over the landscape. The financiers, estate-agents, insurance managers, businessmen and their hacks had made up scare stories about the economy being in danger of collapsing if they were prevented from running the banks, newspapers and industries without regulation. They said it would be necessary for the good people to give up their rights and liberties for the time being, agree to be watched by CCTV at all hours of the day, and have all of their work, business and personal lives monitored. For their own safety of course, and only temporary. Pensions, working rights, democracy and dignity were extravagances that the good people could no longer afford, said the banditos, all the while twiddling their perfumed moustaches and sniggering into their platinum cuff-links. When the good peoples money disappeared into esoteric financial speculation machines, the banditos reassured them that only they knew how the banking system worked. In London, the unemployed live in constant fear for the future - it is only a matter of time
65

before they are moved out of the city to the countryside, where there are more employment opportunities and affordable accommodation.2 SCENE 3. BARCLAYS TOWN A young couple live in a dilapidated bedsit in Barclays,3 which they had shared with a large Nigerian family, up until their very recent and sudden disappearance. Their ex-council block, re-clad in primary colours, overlooks the Thames and might once have been a pleasant place. The scene is now dusty, inorganic and lifeless, Banditos arrogantly roam the area, buying up property and indiscriminately hassling the non-white youth of the area. These young hopefuls are more fortunate than most. Bill works as a freelance Estates Assistant, often late into the night removing the graffiti, broken glass and detritus thrown out by the city poor. His job makes him frequently ill. Jane, his partner, is a freelance lunch artist for various chain sandwich and burger stores in the West End. Bill and Jane lead a contented life, all things considered, having reduced their outgoings to match their meagre income. They spend their precious spare-time together, playing old board games, going for long walks around historic Woolwich, cooking and eating simple food, reading old books to each other, and other quaint and thoroughly wholesome habits. Their only luxury is an illegal and obese cat called Philip.4 These good people have little idea of the nefarious forces in league against them.... SCENE 4. DAVID CAMERON, A VISION OF THE PAST 15th May, 1988: David Cameron sits at his Brasenose College desk reading James
66

Lovelocks Revenge of Gaia, The Smiths The Queen is Dead playing loudly in the background. Unlike the rest of society, David Cameron not only takes Lovelocks findings very seriously, he is determined to make out of them a political manifesto. Of course, if he ever manages to get into power, he can never disclose this manifesto to the ordinary idiot public, or even the majority of his peers in Parliament. He had to take power in the interests of mankind as Lovelock says: Democracy might have to put on hold. As he waits for his final exam, David Cameron idly invents future speeches in his mind: Britain now needs is a strong central government that can make the difficult decisions. Traditional values are neededcommunity, family, loyalty, and citizenship Discontent against the banditos was now rising high amongst alarm-clock Britain,5 with the wide level of poverty, homelessness and misery even starting to embarrass some of his wealthy peers. At the start of his leadership, Cameron needed a concept that could co-opt all this discontent into some meaningless vent that would involve the public running state institutions for free whilst the national assets were handed over to banks and multi-national corporations. Some great money trick that might also play into the condescending paternalism the middle-class felt about responsibility, causing communities to buckle and blame each other for their fragmentation and decline. And then he recalled a pamphlet hed come across back in 1988, which had caused him and his chums great mirth in that halcyon College mess room: The Big Society: A Communist Map for Britain by a Mr Karl Hero. Yes....yes....YES! Ha! Since 2014 the idea had been taught to 5 year olds on the National Curriculum, drip-fed into their literacy and numeracy. If only this this Karl Hero knew. He sniggered

somewhat uncontrollably, his high-pitched porcine laughter now causing some of his morose cronies to share in the mirth. SCENE 5. BACK TO THE PRESENT: OUR HEROES UNITE! As in the obligatory light-hearted scene of any Western, Bill and Jane stumble on a half-dressed Karl Hero in a particularly wild part of Greenwich park. He has just emerged out of a bush having completed the morning ablutions. They quickly get along, unaware of the significance of this encounter. Jane offers chicken tikka sandwiches to the well-spoken and quickwitted Anarcho-biker,6 and he impresses them with his funny ideas about proletarian revolution and the overthrow of the bourgeois elite. Bill cant help feeling that Karl has all the disarming intensity and breathless grace of a holy man. Neither Bill nor Jane have ever met a man like Karl. They dont really understand what Karl is going on about half the time, but they were nevertheless compelled to ask him to stay with them just for a few nights. Though the proletariat were not ready for his message of global justice and universal harmony, told the impressionable couple of his travels from city to city, preaching his message to indifferent crowds of local people. In the evenings Bill and Jane snuggled up against each other in candlelight as Karl told stories while Philip slept on his lap, of non-EU immigrants who are perpetually passed through detention centres without ever being instructed on the progress of their case. He scared them with depressing visions of environmental apocalypse, occasionally interspersed with lectures on revolution, freedom, responsibility and most importantly,social action.

SCENE 6. EVICTION Karl is forced to leave to deliver a lecture on Revolutionary Praxis and the Event, but returns the following morning , and on arrival gives the cheery couple a lengthy oration of the history of magical Marxism. But the couple are too busy picking their noses and scanning over the post. Well look at that, remarks Jane to Bill, both sitting idly by the window, picking at some toast. The estate agents think our flat might be worth a good deal of money! Let me see that!, Karl retorts, snatching the letter out of Janes hand. But look below! Theyre evicting you, you damn fools! Youre breaching your tenancy agreement with the bloody cat he looked at Philip, reclining luxuriously on his kitbag. Youll be getting no compensation! Banditos! Bastard banditos! I knew they had to be behind this. SCENE 7. FINAL SHOWDOWN Karl knew very little about property prices, but he did know that banditos equalled bad news. Karl storms off to the Mayors office, which had been temporarily relocated to the luxury health spa owned by a wealthy local estate agent, Bare Faced Thieves Ltd.7 Karl plans to make a great entrance, but his attempt to swagger through the entrance is deterred by the door being locked. After a little while a woman comes over. Can I help you?, she asks with a yawn. I have nothing to lose, and speaking the truth is the only thing I can do Karl replies, glaring intensely into her hazel eyes. Okay, well if you want to talk to an advisor the queue is over there, she points to a lounge area inside. The interior of the estate agent seems more like a trendy wine-bar, with banditos in striped shirts and gelled back hair
67

"The interior of the estate agent seems more like a trendy wine-bar, with banditos

in striped shirts and gelled back hair reclining next to a shimmering swimming pool, sipping at bottles of Mexican lager. Occasionally there is an explosion of activity, and wads of cash are launched into the air, only to be retrieved almost immediately in a desperate frenzy."

reclining next to a shimmering swimming pool, sipping at bottles of Mexican lager. Occasionally there is an explosion of activity, and wads of cash are launched into the air, only to be retrieved almost immediately in a desperate frenzy. I have no time for this nonsense! cries Karl suddenly, pushing his way through a crowd of banditos chilling out by the Mayors door. The Mayors office was expansive with a floor of sparkling granite, its four white walls adorned with a few recognisable paintings and also those 3D moving landscapes of Alpine peaks and Californian beaches, which used to be found in Chinese takeaways. Hero, utters the Mayor mellifluously. She holds out her hand, as if she expecting Karl to kiss it. She is a shrunken old woman, with bland features sparsely etched across her complacent oval face. She was once on the popular TV show Dragons Den, and her skin showed the traces of years of exploiting nave young entrepreneurs. Karl can sense a class enemy. After a moments confusion at Karls refusal to kneel down before her, the Mayor retracts her hand and sits down. I know all about your case.You see Ive just been speaking to the Prime Minister. That Tory s---!, mutters Karl, in disbelief, but the Mayor carries on speaking.
68

The land on which your friends estate is built is worth a lot of money. And our local MP plans to build a luxury high-rise, complete with casino, helipad, penthouse, etc.. Its all in his sons name, Eton boy, lovely lad. Its all tax-free, of course. Bare Faced Thieves Ltd have already sold half the properties and the things not even built! The mayor chuckles, picking out a piece of dirt from under her thumbnail. What about Bill and Jane, my friends? You know they have nowhere to go! How can you do this, you vile, unspeakable cretin? cries Karl, his sense of drama soaring to new levels of buffoonery. Now calm down. They shouldnt have hidden an illegal pet on their rented property. There is a pause, indicating that the Mayor considers the case closed. She eventually looks up again, surprised to see Karl still standing in front of her. If that is all, then please leave at once. Realising there is no dialogue to be held with this corrupt old hag, Karl explains to the Mayor that the property Bill and Jane are currently renting is in actual fact his property. Karl waits for this information to sink in before going on, My mother, their former landlady, passed away yesterday, yes that dear woman who now incongruously appears in the

We need a more authoritative world. We've become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

Western narrative, and therefore, as the next of kin, I am here to claim ownership of this property. I am in fact the child of a bourgeois landowner! The confession of this fact gives Karl a strange sense of pride. The Mayor cannot believe what she is hearing. Her career aspirations to be an important member of central government and bandito par excellence have been ruined by that idiot David Cameron. The value of the Barclays block is such that Karl could now afford to establish his own media company and bombast the proletariat with revolutionary propaganda, if he so wished. Camerons interference had screwed up everything. The image of a red and blackclad Barclays high-rise, renamed Lenin Towers, issuing the precarious proletariat with free editions of bombastic Marxist classics would cause an untold stink for her political career.The Mayor grudgingly agrees to look into Karls claim, and hands him a pile of inscrutable paperwork. Karl leaves, and she is immediately on the phone to Camerons secretary, Nick Clegg. However, not even that liberal wet-blanket had any sympathy for her.

SCENE 8. RESOLUTION AND PEACE Come in, Karl, old friend! Bill and Jane are genuinely pleased to see him, and their spirits are temporarily lifted. Karl carefully unfastens his coat, allowing the sandybrown tabby to leap out of it with a meow! Thats right Philip! Everythings gonna be all right Whats this? Jane asks. Well, in this envelope you will find the Title to this flat, which is now owned in its entirety by you and Jane. No more estate agents, no more interference from anyone. My gift to you. Before Bill can protest, which he fully intends to, Karl delivers his final oration. So it is, replied Karl, elliptically. The people need a real leader, like me now. And what with the value of this block, I can establish my own media empire to flood the proletariat with strategic optimism and Marxist propaganda But as he leaves, Karl turns and says to Bill and Jane, Really I want no part of this capitalist game; Im happy living on the road with nothing but my integrity. Look after Philip. Ill be coming to check up on him very soon! THE END
69

NOTES 1. James Lovelock, in an interview with The Guardian, March 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock 2. David Cameron, Decentralizing Unemployment; 23rd April 2024. 3. Used to be called Woolwich, but the whole area and name was inevitably bought out by Barclays after purchasing the areas eponymous local bank. 4. On the 12th July 2034, the Department for Domestic Health and Welfare passed a law banning all pets on the grounds that they were becoming an acute public health hazard. Over the years since the Credit Crunch, more and more houses were abandoned as the poor and unemployed were forced out of London, and as a result pets were left to roam the streets in search of food and shelter. Cats especially multiplied at an alarming rate, and they started spreading diseases across the poorer parts of the city. As soon as the problem reached the affluent areas, the new laws were passed allowing animal rights to be suspended in such situations, and landlords now have the power to evict instantly any tenant found harbouring pets in their property. 5. Nick Clegg, The New Politics: Liberalising Alarm-Clock Britain, The New Men-Men, and Memoirs of an Emotional Guy, co-written with Niall Ferguson and Michael McIntyre (Shenzhen: Google, 2019), 887 not even ascetic revolutionaries like Karl Hero could predict just how successful Clegg's brand of yes-saying would be. 6. People no longer have time for cooking, art, music, friendship or love, and regardless these skills were lost when a business consortium led by News Corp. and Virgin Media took over the privatised National Curriculum in 2022. A Google-Mori survey of 2028 reported that the most common activity of citizens was travelling to distant industrial estates at the very periphery of large cities in search of jobs that may or may not exist.The more fortunate healthy young couples have been fasttracked into lucrative careers in the emerging economic society of the North Pole Developments. See Developing the Mental-apps for mega-bucks, The Sun, 19th Dec 2029. 7. Once named Bairstow Eves, they felt that in the current climate of capitalist hegemony, one could drop the pretence and revert to the original title.
70

Nyx a noctournal
T
his metamorphosis is almost complete. Nyx six will be published later in the year, so send courageous and clairvoyant contributions to noctournal@gmail.com - design, fictions, photographs, reviews and theory all highly sought for. Find us online for more clues. Morning approaches, that time for words is done.

Image by Julia Scheele: www.juliascheele.co.uk

71

72