Break/Flow in the Shadow City

To break a habit, establish a new rhythm – simple devices, a mid-week drunk. It never failed. Break down the old patterns, the worn out connections and the spirit breaks loose, establishes new polarities, creates new tensions, bequeaths new vitality

Henry Miller: Sexus

Break/Flow in the Shadow City

Break/Flow is an autonomous publication that hopes to function in several spaces simultaneously. Though inspired by music, theory, politics, and the literary, it is intensified enough to follow trajectories out of these never once isolatable spheres and inhabit the connections between them. The record is read. The text is played. The historic expands into the present. All the while, Break/Flow is aware that moves towards the interdisciplinary are a renewed academic form that can be used as a fashionable affectation. It has got to be said that, outside of the institution, such a form is lived as a psychic drift, a moving from one to the other, a stroll into and out of books, rooms, conversations, images, streets, sounds… It is as if, in this shadow city, we have an indisputable right of access to any space, any concept, any language. We wander into liberated zones further and further away from discipline and discipledom, from conceptual cul-de-sacs. Means and ends proliferate and re-integrate. Practice is happening all the time.

What can be most galling are those journalists who speak with money in their mouths and the revolutionary paranoiacs who function in relation to static truths. The careerists and the mechanical militants. Both allow power to tamper with them as they nurture their roles, as they conform to commerce. The bile that passes between them is as much the recognition that they have elitism In common as it is some irreconcilable opposition. Journals without journalists! Art without the Artists! Novels without the novelists! Revolution without the Revolutionaries!

Why make an issue out of the autonomous? There’s plenty of reasons. On the whole what we have is a certain amount of closed spaces, which act as ghettos: an avant-garde ghetto of intelligence-mongers; a revolutionary ghetto of pre-established tracks and frustration; a media ghetto, where at best, avant-gardists and radicals get a chance to come into soft focus, Each of these ghettos demands a conformity of behaviour and utterance. You’ve got to play the game, tow the line, ask the acceptable questions.and be careful not to puke on the corporate carpet. You’ve got to operate on the scene and enter into the ever widening ghetto where communication always carries ulterior motives, Rather than get trapped in these zones of autism it seems more worthwhile to traverse these, and other ghettos, and get lost…become an ever more spurious opposition. But there is more to the autonomous than establishing spaces in the interstice. For one, there is the way that the autonomous dissolves that old boundary between the individual and the collective, Deleuze and Guattari say that which depends on a free creative activity is also that which, independently and necessarily, posits itself in itself: the most subjective will be the most objective¹. Autonomous creativity works for itself to the extent that It doesn’t work for the Man. Free from these criteria the autonomous seek each other out, aware, to varying degrees, that their practico-conceptual activity is operating at one or several removes from the ghetto. They are careful not to be drawn-in to a too close proximity. Knowing each other in this way there is no need to be Known. Invisible insurrection, Autonomous projects fold, disappear and crop up elsewhere…wreaking havoc with the opinions we may form of them. Communicating in this way, we know their very presence and persistence is somewhere along a line leading from dissatisfaction to disengagement and beyond.

The possible or I shall suffocate.

It is the very nature of every intensity to invest within itself the Zero intensity starting from which it is produced ². As the record ends there is a silence. Then the next record. break/flow. Breakdown. Something happens in-between. Expectancy. A tension of anticipation. The creation of desiring-energy…the prefiguration of the next situation to be constructed³. From a moment comes an aeon. Into the breach flow word bombs and a kaleidoscope of perception images. Into another breach stumbles the impossibility of anything. The break can be the temporary cessation, the coming up against limits and the blank of thought – to know only ignorance, to lose any certainty, to be waiting for the next flow to come from a phrase, a challenge, a track. The break wipes the slate clean …those that already know cannot go beyond a known horizon⁴ says Bataille, with his customary drama, but all the while he is aware that it’s not a matter of an accumulation of passion-flows as bankable cultural capital. His ‘non-knowledge’ is really only an articulation of a shared experiential-knowledge, micro-perception and lived pleasure. Losing it, finding it… the break/flow is the challenge held out to the artificiality of an ever- creeping linear dogma. Such knowledge is only a barrier, a protective armour, most commonly wielded as a power. But…the flow could lead over the cliff…the flow could implode in the silence of a cell.

****

The links between capitalism and the formation of obedient subjects is an area that requires a renewed collective investigation. The processes of the formation of conformity, the manipulation of consciousness, the creation of those who come to desire their own repression is a pressing area of concern. A break on social change. The depth, levels and mechanisms of such processes are investigated by Deleuze and Guattari in their much flaunted text, Anti-Oedipus. In this work they build up an historic picture of capitalism that contains the notion of an infinite debt becoming internalised as guilt and a displacing of its interior limits in an ever widening absorbtion. It would be a mistake to take this work simply as a source of metaphors or as a disengaged, trendy post-structuralist text. Some tentative meanderings inspired by Anti-Oedipus are offered up here as Schizo-Politics for Scallies, Part 0.0001.

How many revolutionary groups as such are already in place for a co-option that will be carried out only in the future, and form an apparatus for the absorption of surplus value not even produced yet – which gives them precisely an apparent revolutionary position⁵. The idea of revolutionary purity and revolution as some kind of chore is perhaps one of the most damaging emanations of the Situationist International (SI). Others could be added, particularly the ever persisting role of the intellectual as a prime mover in social change. However, at its demise an SI that had in an earlier guise offered up an inventive optimism and a large confusion of ideas⁶ seduced Its readers into a double pronged contraction: an historical retracing of the workers movement which placed the SI at its pinnacle and the diffusion of situationist Ideas into everyone’s heads. This latter claim is quite laughable considering that throughout the 60s the SI had done all it could to distance itself from those who acted as sources and pipelines for its theories at the same time that it was busy expelling those who were too contradictory to its desire to develop a comprehensive theory – ie the cultural revolutionaries. The creation of value is always made through the devalorisation of another⁷. Break/Flow, as part of an effort to seek the SI in its exclusion zones, presents here two texts by British situationist Alexander Trocchi: General Informations and Potlatch formed part of the Sigma Portfolio.

This was just one facet of Project Sigma, a counter-cultural venture that is discussed in an introductory article. We also re-print a Manifesto from Group Spur who, as the German Section of the SI, were excluded in 1962.. These texts are brought back from their suspended animation, resuscitated and put into play. It is hoped that they put a break on what surrounds them, or flow into these surroundings.

The problem…is to alert, sustain, inform, inspire and make vividly conscious of itself all intelligence everywhere from now on⁸. Here, Alex Trocchi expresses the importance of cultural revolt: the contagion of passion, the creation of cultural confidence, the diffusion of mutual encouragement. Just as the theory of the spectacle comes to exert a wider influence as a set-text, it is being undermined, in practice, by those that dance, dialogue and interpenetrate with music, texts and film. Ex-situationist Asger Jorn critiqued the concept himself when he wrote, in 1960, that each spectator can make of the work of art what they will…they control how the new energies liberated within themselves are disposed ⁹. These aspects of experimental agency are crucial to the imparting of self-confidence and a confidence In others. The autonomy of the subject. Opening out to multiplicity from a beginning in two-way communication we have the listener as operator, and what American writer Ronald Sukenick has called reader liberation. The elitist, enclosed view of culture leads to self-denial and prostration before media-appointed stars and academically pumped-up theorists. Surface affects. These over-arching vertical vectors and their immobile identities can be replaced by the lateral movements of invisible insurrection.

Cultures of parallel and connection. Clusters seeking out other clusters, In this way when Jorn speaks of the ‘spectator’ controlling the new energies he is articulating the groundwork of autonomous participation, a terrain that the SI gradually moved away from. Just as a communication occurs with the new energies liberated, so this dialogue is continually sought out in others…the seeking out of a common ground…to make vividly conscious of itself the intelligence of others…becoming polyphonic. The elitist wielding of knowledge as power, blocks this process and re-assigns the enclosures of specialisation. Tradesmen guard their secrets. Intellectuals of all countries kill yourselves! ¹⁰.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say literature¹¹. Underground culture is one space where communication and participation work like a contagion. One reason for presenting in Break/Flow texts from the post-war cultural underground is to offer some form of continuity, linkage and inspiration, One connective-point from the early 70s is Ronald Sukenick. Involved in promoting a literary counter-canon through Black Ice books and Fiction Collective, Ron Sukenick has been constantly writing works that experiment with the staple-diet of the novel to the extent that, by challenging the literary representation of the conscious and the sub-conscious, they shed renewed light on the working of the imagination. These and other writings draw our attention to the power inherent in language and the manipulations it makes feasible: everything is written in the despots procession¹². But words can be put to another use. Writers like Miller, Bataille, Celine, Burroughs show us the possibilities of living and thinking differently, not through prescriptive and didactic texts but through a flow and movement that can stimulate like drugs and music. in Sukenick’s late 60s novel Out, the text speeds up and with it the reader experiences an intensification of thought beyond the conceptual and discursive. The parallels these novels have with music is remarkable…there is a grasping of experience…of music changing minds…a received agitation. Break/Flow presents here You Don’t Have To Understand, an unpublished interview carried out with Ron Sukenick in May 1995.

An important inspiration behind Break/Flow is an involvement in the electronic dance underground that has eclipsed punk as the music best suited to practices of freedom. The possibilities of cultural rebellion are more diffuse with this music which is less rhetorical, less tied to the signifier than punk. But this rebellion is nonetheless present as practice: anonymous producers; a myriad of independent labels; abstract sounds; the collectivity of dance; the absence of words as a medium of interpretation; the accent on use and re-use rather than consumption; underground distribution networks by-passing the middlemen; unlicensed parties. They tried to get some tracks out of us but I couldn’t do it for the money… They just flashed money in peoples faces and, as far as I’m concerned, I can’t jeopardize what | do for cash, That’s slavery. I’d rather be free¹³. As electronic dance music becomes more of a commercial proposition (note with caution the prefix “intelligent”), there are still pockets of resistance. For all those willing to sign on the dotted line, there are others that sign with their own agendas and others still that maintain a distance. What becomes clearer though is the way that music can change minds, how it operates not simply as ‘entertainment, as a distraction, but as a break/flow.. Punk was mainly interpreted through lyrics, electronic dance, with an ever expanding sense of aural possibility through its access to analogue and digital machinery, opens up areas where the effects of music on listeners and dancers becomes an area of non-knowledge, a break with common assumptions, a pathway to cultural confidence and optimism. A social magic. That music is a shared experience should not be overlooked. Several texts that follow focus on “scenes” that the mainstream media hasn’t got the sensibility to find. As with Break/Flow’s sister project, TechNET, there is an attempt to discuss these affects in an experimental way. The prevalent journalistic manner always returns us to the signifier but an approach that draws upon a tracery of theory and fiction seems more appropriate.

****

Night Moves. Within the shadow city we drift. Defined more by the states through which we pass than the alcohol we have drunk. Opening out to the hum of traffic, the smashing of glass. Stunned by slowly changing reflexive ambiances. Slipping, Stopping and starting. Stammering. Pushing through the overgrowth by the railway tracks to a sequence of cottages adjoined to a disused paper-board mill. Clambering through a hole in the wall. A dusty pink light coming from a room filled with discarded furniture, syringes, crushed cans. This is some kind of aftermath…a detritus. Just one of many exits into the breach. A reel-to-reel tape machine remains. A disembodied voice crackles from two portable speakers no bigger than the crushed fag packets which surround them. The voice caught in a loop across contracting time: We didn’t know what to say. Words form themselves into sequences and gestures recognise each other. Outside us. Of course some methods are mastered, some results verified. It’s often pleasant. But so many things we wanted have not been attained; or only partially and not like we thought. What communication have we desired, or experienced, or only simulated? What project has been lost?

Howard Slater

Notes

1. Deleuze and Guattari: What Is Philosophy? (Verso 1994) p11. ↩︎
2. Deleuze and Guattari: Anti-Oedipus (Athlone 1983) p330. ↩︎
3. Raoul Vaneigem: Revolution of Everyday Life (Rebel Press 1983) p178. ↩︎
4. Georges Bataille: Inner Experience (Suny – 1988) p3. ↩︎
5. Deleuze and Guattari: ibid, p338. ↩︎
6. G. Debord/G. Wolman: Why Lettrism? (Potlatch No.22 1955). ↩︎
7. Asger Jorn: Critique of Political Economy (Unpopular Books 1996). ↩︎
8. Alexander Trocchi: General Informations (Sigma Portfolio No.5 1964). ↩︎
9. Asger Jorn, ibid. ↩︎
10. Asger Jorn, ibid. ↩︎
11. Henry Miller: Black Spring (Panther 1974), p9. ↩︎
12. Deleuze and Guattari: ibid, p202. ↩︎
13. Lawrence Burden of 430 West Record, Detroit talking about refusing to license tracks to a major-label compilation: Musik, April 1996. ↩︎

• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 1
• All articles from Break/Flow 1

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