Datacide

Author: Howard Slater

1996ArticlesBreak/Flow 1
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Alexander Trocchi and Project Sigma

Over the years, Alex Trocchi’s importance to British underground culture has been sorely neglected. The only published biography deals with Trocchi solely as a literary figure and skims over his association with the likes of Wallace Berman, Guy Debord, RD Laing, William Burroughs, Michael X and others. Rather than restrict Trocchi to this literary classification and berate him for never having come up with the goods after a promising start, it is better to take him on his own terms: as an energised cultural catalyst, one interested in meta-categorical (r)evolt, the insurrection of a million minds.

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1996ArticlesBreak/Flow 1
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On Anti-Oedipus: Schizo-politics for Scallies Part 0.0001

On Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari subtitled Schizo-politics for Scallies from Break/Flow 1, 1996 with a short intro 2024.

In the aftermath of the Poll Tax rebellion sense of ‘disenchantment’ was rife. For Howard Slater the key zone of investigation became what could be termed Marxist-Freudianism and an ongoing engagement with Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus was pivotal.

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19992024ArticlesDatacide 6Film ReviewsOnline Exclusive
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“Long Live Death!” – On Pasolini’s Salò (2024)

This text on Pasolini’s Salò first appeared something like 25 years ago in Datacide No.6. It was part of a sequence of texts on cinema which began with a piece on Alan Pakula’s Parallax View and ended in a text on Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Here Howard Slater returns to and revives his psycho-social analysis of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.

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2023Datacide 19
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The Electronic Disturbance Zone – Part 1

Following on from a talk/listening session given at the launch for Datacide 18 at Ridley Road Social Club in February 2020, Howard Slater expanded on the theme of the Electronic Disturbance Zone in the following work in progress.

General Outline: 0. Preamble (Sonic Theory, Pierre Schaeffer, EDZ at Dead by Dawn, techno and ambient) 1. Environment Recordings (Luc Ferrari, Murray Schafer) 2. Entity music (Walter Marchetti) 3. Drone (Eliane Radigue, Roland Kayn) 4. Aural collage (John Cage, Luc Ferrari, Industrial) 5. Studio Based Electronics (Stockhausen, Bernard Parmegiani ) 6. Live Electronic Improvisation (David Tudor, Morphogenesis etc) 7. Hybrids/ Heterogeneity (decategorisation)

Part 2 of this text will appear in the next issue of Datacide and will cover Drone through to Studio Based Electronics.

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2017ArticlesDatacide 17
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Unparaphraseable Life – Notes on Third Cinema

Picking up again on Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘post media’, Howard Slater here explores the liberating aspects of the Third Cinema of such directors as Djibril Diop Mambéty and Med Hondo. Drawing on the writings of Teshome Gabriel this text reveals Third Cinema as being an ever-valid challenge to mainstream Western notions of the cinema as a conditioning monoform.

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2017ArticlesDatacide 16
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‘Comrade Doctor’ – On David Cooper and ‘Anti-Psychiatry’

‘Comrade Doctor’ is an in-depth article by Howard Slater on David Cooper and ‘Anti-Psychiatry’ from Datacide 16 and a critical response to Christoph Fringeli’s review of Peter Sedgewick’s ‘Psycho-Politics’. He examines the tension between sedate rationality and radical psychiatry, contrasting Laing’s romanticism with David Cooper’s push for politicizing madness to challenge capitalist norms and social alienation.

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2017ArticlesBook ReviewsDatacide 16
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Demented Idioms – Schizo-Culture: The Event (1975) & The Book (1978)

Schizo Culture was a conference and accompanying journal about a gathering in November 1975, which brought (mainly untranslated) French theorists into collision and collaboration with elements of the SoHo Art Scene and with anti-psychiatry and prison activists. Recently re-published in book form.

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2016ArticlesDatacide 15
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Sincere Genesis – On Félix Guattari & Groups

For a left that rejects the party-form and in times in which the ‘soviet’ model of workers councils became less viable, the question of organization has proved problematic. Guattari, a life-long member of militant groups from the 60s onwards, never failed to address this issue of how we can ‘belong together’. This short text offers the rudiments of Guattari’s response as informed by his work as a maverick psychoanalyst and his ideas of a micro-politics that upsets long-held views of what it is to be an ‘individual.’

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