Burnt Money Weekend

the personal element tuning, 

by reflection upon itself,

into the impersonal

Special significance of fantasy:

Missed again. The sacrifice is ourselves. Drawn and quartered over a hundred mispronounced and stammered words; never knowing when to stop, being unable; awaiting, as if by magic, for a more fitting utterance. Something truer to ourselves. Improbable. Impossible. The fictional personae have already kicked-in and it is as if the sluice gates are opening to allow-out trickled half knowledges of people that are somehow always taken as fact. As if it were ever possible to understand someone; especially the ones we are drawn towards, the ones to whom we impute the warm glow of probability that, as it recedes, becomes less likely and even more transfixing. It is these who we commonly misinterpret, and, what arrogance, there are moments, prolonged and intoxicated, when we all too readily believe our own fantasy; see in a look, a look of pity when it could be one of frightened adoration; a look of hate, when it could be a look as benign as disbelief. Yet, they dance together and I cannot remove myself far enough from myself to dance with them too. It is as if I would rather watch and wait, displacing the aura of their adoration for each other onto the more resonant possibility of a continually deferred and overdetermined pleasure to come. Then again, for tonight, I have already established, and had established, my persona, and it cloys to me like an awkward acquaintance. I know this one and it doesn’t deserve to be linked-in and touched by a turned head; but neither does it deserve to be taken at face value and be dismissively apprehended.  Instead of rising to join them in their dance I move along the settee, draw back the curtain and look out into the grey light. A disused playground. A mesh fence. The greasy frames of silent windows. This could be an event of morose separation; its deliberate melodrama being a way to summon up another persona. I catch a reflection of movement. Askance. What is it that makes us so sure we are not imposters?

scene dreamed, dramatised, ritualised

*

Demonstrative:

The personae are also constructed for me. Dismissed, maintaining a distance, this inviolability is worked-up into an adrenalin rush of contrivance and wagered fantasy. The longer this fabrication can be maintained, the more it is felt as a thrill, an experiment in dishonesty that can cut to the quick of an unconscious that knows no ‘false’, knows no ‘real’. This is perhaps how to appreciate such notions as “the vertigo of the self” … a construct that leads away from the terra firma of taught subjectification and ideological consensus, but which must pass through other terrifyingly mundane phases: common, hourly misinterpretations that run the constant risk of deferment and self loathing: “No you are not so certain after all.” And so, being challenged to account for oneself, to remain in place, gives rise to being deflected from an ideal (an ethico-communist rather religio-moral ideal) and summons up the horror of social anxiety: what passes by unremarked upon is self-perceived as aggressive cruelty and brings, out of nothing, a dread of lost love; even a love that can never be enacted, a kind of virtual love, is felt as that which is always in the process of being lost. It is not so much a sadistic cruelty, a cliche of never experienced extremes, but the cruelty of a direct and insistent openness that, uttering what is incommunicable in a given situation, creates the conditions for social disintegration. The force of voluntary servitude seems to come to exert itself in these places where the communicable is withheld, where the unconscious is feared: the schizo talks and talks riddles into this hole, and the masochist exhibitionistically finds satisfaction in such self exposure. The personae increase, the subjective splitting multiplies and cracks… there are more and more places from which to talk, there is an urgency, as, never being quite constituted as a ‘person’, less and less becomes repressed. Is it then that a power comes to reside in what is not said; the repression of emotion playing just as large a part in the maintenance of capitalist social relation as wages and prices?

resolves anxiety, allows enjoyment of pleasure

**

Suspense Factor.

The persona plays its line, plays it to the tedious edge of the line. In its insistence it is barely noticeable and not at all dramatic. It is quite contained, but quietly it is embarrassing itself and it hardly knows how, until later. For these other personae such an overspill provides elements of suspense; they listen in the hope of horror. Autonomous perspectives. A cruelty of word, or even of pause, a purposefully made blunder, drawing yet another out into the open and awaiting the judgement; watching as defensive prejudice comes to the surface: “I’m not like that.” And the greatest prejudice of them all, the civilized prejudice, is that one person is ‘better’ than another, that one person is ‘right’ and one person is ‘wrong.’ We’re socialised into dualism and from there it can get as sophisticated as a pleasure principle coming up against a reality principle. The super-ego ruling ego ruling the id …  civilisation taming biological instinct. For psychoanalysis this impasse is the gospel. These ironclad laws create repression. Normality is defined in this court: instinctual renunciation creates conscience; freedom and desire are equated with a barbaric, childish phase of pre-history and so freedom is rejected and conscience turns tighter, becomes guilt. “The instinct for freedom is forced to become latent… to vent its energy upon itself.” If guilt is another factor in our voluntary servitude, its most material expression, then how do we overcome the masochistic “joy felt by denying”, how do we pay the supra-inflational debt still owed to living ancestors and ideological totems? Is it by means of consciously constructing guilt, hanging upside down, not just in a staged and contracted private space, but in public? Is it here that the personae can run rife, their voices not knowing when to stop, not acknowledging the boundaries of the public and the private? If the schizo takes-in the ‘outside’ and spills it back out again in a differing outside. If the schizo knows no experiential barrier, then the conscious masochist knows that punishment does not follow pleasure, but unlimited pleasure follows upon the negation of punishment. There is no law, and autonomy in Nietzsche’s sense is a possibility:

“The sovereign individual, equal only to himself, all moral custom left far behind. This autonomous, more than moral individual has developed his own independent long range will.” Accentuated guilt makes socially tangible these moral customs and beliefs, re-enacting and re-creating them as absurd and objectionable. Equal only to themselves, neither inferior nor superior to anyone else, supposed submission, itself a force, then carries contempt, criticism and a provocation. It is too submissive, it takes a blow and it gets up, contemptuous of physical power and critical of its ideological backup it provokes further revelatory blows. It can call on another persona. It plays social power backward, revealing the imperialist logic of individualism and identity. It can wait. With a long range will it can, like imprisoned comrades, wait forever.

bound by words alone

***

Provocative Fear.

When it is fear that is sought-out, seen as a component that can be transformed into all manner of energies and intensities, then it becomes possible to track the source of these fears; examine how they are constructed, what socially-constraining purpose they serve. Increase fear, increase stimulus and resistance, become fearless. Autotrauma as revolutionary credo. Yet it is crucial that in the masochistic tableau the partners are most fearful of delimiting the pleasure to be gained by each, yet are not at all fearful of how their actions would be perceived by those who have everything to fear from their activity. The tableau with its shifting personae can entertain no stability of subject. It is as suddenly capricious as the schizo and likewise, a certain self-criticism (reflection) makes of the self (personal) an object (impersonal); it allows for unconventional alignments to be made between normally unalloyable descriptive words (exquisite/agony, sensuality/earnestness). And so on. Power as the interplay of forces becomes tangible and not deceptive and surreptitious. So too, desire is no longer purely personal and ineffectual, but capable of allusive emotion. ‘Free will’, the guided and economically-reliant illusion of capitalism, is exercised to a subversive degree whilst being apparently absent… submission can, in this instance, appear like a metaphor for forms of unconscious subjugation whilst its attendant sadism appears as an abrogation of the repressed instincts of primitive, unsocialised cruelty.

exhibit suffering, embarrassment and humiliation

****

Contract.

The twenty-quid note burns in the ash-tray like some ritualised re-enactment of freedom.  Scintillating orange and green svelte. This is a theatre that resists despair and decadence and by being both sadistic and masochistic moves towards the breaching of a taboo. By burning money amongst ourselves we make demonstrable the core of what enslaves us: this money, the epitome of exchange and equivalence, that levels all to the status of chattel-goods, this fear-abator that fends off the reality of survival, this worthless piece of shit, the pursuit of which robs us of a present already sold to a dictated-to future; this twenty-quid couldn’t save anyone; it can’t feed anyone, it does not solve anything. Temporarily its logic is turned against it. No longer is it being used to buy a product, something tangible, but the uselessness of the possible product (and a few are listed) is displaced onto the twenty-quid note making it equally useless. The twenty-quid note is not equivalent to desires that resist being weighed and monetised. And so, belonging nowhere, we hurry towards self-abuse: we have damaged ourselves, we cannot afford the luxury, but we are already being wounded by those micro-conformities we cannot even see. The self-inflicted lash of voluntary masochism. Made giddy with the exteriorisation of uncivilisable social desire. This twenty-quid, complete with its signatures and sub-clauses, is the only masochist’s contract that lacks a safe word, there are no known signals that will permit the cruel blows of cash to desist from their harshness and equitably distribute a smile of austere beauty. But for now, watching the twenty-quid burn, our bodies hunched around the ash-tray, we feel momentarily free from one of our contracts and ready to draw up another one that carries the header-quote: “Our conscience is a mirror – only idiots are bothered by what they see there.”

*****

Notes

Written in collaboration with V44302 as the second New Acephale text and assembled with samples from Gilles Deleuze, On Coldness and Cruelty; Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals; Georg Buchner, Danton’s Death; Anne Mclintock, Imperial Leather.

• Other texts by Howard Slater on datacide-magazine.com
• Table of content of Break/Flow 2
• All articles from Break/Flow 2

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