Sigma Portfolio No. 4 – POTLATCH

Document: Alexander Trocchi’s Sigma Portfolio Number 4, inspired by the concept of Potlatch and ideas of Lettrisme and Situationism as re-published in the first issue of Break/Flow in 1996

6 St Stephen’s Gardens

London W.2.

July, 1964

I am sending you herewith a copy of my immediate contribution to an interpersonal log-book entitled potlatch. This will be sent to a number of our mutual acquaintances in the hope that they will be inspired to contribute. If this round-robin gets off the ground, sigma will attempt to organise an annual subscription as described in the note, and to apportion earnings.

There are no rules. I append a list of people to whom I am sending this first statement. If you respond, we shall have your contribution roneoed and distribute it to those people on the list. If you wish to add names to the list, do so. We shall extend the chain. The thing should develop into an interesting interpersonal work-in-progress, with all kinds of layers and laminations and possibilities for satire. There is no limit to what it could become. And sigma should be able to exploit it financially for all in whatever way suggests itself as the process evolves. This seems to me to be one of the many possible ways of outflanking normal channels of communication and creating an international underground body of opinion beyond conventional limits.

Qu’est-ce que tu en pense?

Simultaneously, we are having printed the first number of the underground poster The Moving Times — title by courtesy of W. Burroughs.

This will be posted in underground stations, in coffee houses, art galleries, bookshops, wherever it can conveniently be exposed. It will also “sell” at 1/- (or so) a copy. It is a broadsheet, 20” by 30”, the “editorial” in the first issue composed of quotes from the two sigma essays (and so advertising same), short pieces from writers living and dead and relevant to our moving times, e.g. Martin’s Folly, by William Burroughs, The Real Climate by Kenneth White, The Barbecue by myself, a short chunk of Artaud, etc. We want world-wide distribution for this thing, and, correspondingly, world-wide contributions. We want it hard and relevant, but we have to remember that it is a publicly displayed document, so a certain subtlety of subversion will be essential. If we can have your good will and co-operation in our various engineerings and poster-perversions, a moving times which next month could become the underworld undresser, we think the broadsheet could become as significant as a newspaper in terms of it effective circulation. The conventional media contain the seeds of their own ineffectuality. Our attack has to be an outflanking. And there can be no limit to our subversions.

Kindle me owld passions mit yr spark.

Yrs,

………………………………………..

∑

… The techniques of Lettrisme, particularly that from which it derives its name, the technique of the belles lettres writer that of the contemporary cosmic adventurer as it was of Raleigh and the rest, men urgently concerned with new and astonishing facts; the letters circulated to numerous participants. And others. Some machine, a roneo-type copier, for example, essential to this “art form” or process which includes the “distribution”…as does theatre via actors; roneoed work is quick, simple and unpretentious, and inexpensive, and, used imaginatively, exploiting every expressive repro-technique, could have an impact comparable to that of the original invention of printing… outflanking, as necessary, normal publishing media. This gambit, a round-robin which includes n participants, an inter-personal experiment in expression; a man responding as and when he pleases; copies of his response at once roneoed for circulation; individuals chiming in, checking out at any time. Gradually, an interesting body of material comprising the complex point-counter-point of n vital contemporaries, an imaginative compound of fact and fiction created in concert, would come into being: apart from its intrinsic interest as a trans-individual comment on the times, it could be a profitable undertaking, since many people and institutions would be willing to pay an annual subscription to receive the expanding inter-personal log. “Log”, I say, to emphasise the temporal dimension and the fact that the significance lies in the process of becoming.  But it will be more than a log; it will be expressive as well as descriptive, inventive as well as reportorial, synthetic as well as analytic. Multi-dimensional by virtue of its n participants, it should literally discover many things, including the dialectical process of its own growth. Essentially ludic, and calling, it seems to me, for a particular kind of gesture, it might be called potlatch. The present writing is for a beginning, now…

The idea was finally committed to writing in the period following the man’s (presently yclept Aaron, precaution against ilk Bertie Gander, plook-necked customs’ artificer, who had interrogated him along thirty feet of tressle tables through his fly-man’s telescope) return from the United States, the deed done like many others in that part of his temporary quarters given over to the holy-of-holies, deftly, tentatively, amongst substances, instruments, and engines of experiment, Aaron had gone into the Futique Shop Caper in sheer desperation, having tried during devious wanderings amongst natives of diverse contemporaneous civilizations in sondrie laundes, high and low, far and wide, north and south, east and west, tried, even laboured under effort, to live his life freely, without absolute commitment to one and all of the many relativities teeming about him. He had found himself pressured persistently in all places, in cities and in prisons and villages and hospitals, to define himself clearly in terms familiar to the rudest of those about him, and to act accordingly, on pain of death or harsh confinement.

And wheresoever he did pause to acquaint himself with the local situation did he encounter men who had got themselves into a group to govern as did kings and parliaments according to tradition. Every such group without exception assumed the power of life and death over the individuals who chanced to be or go within its jurisdiction. The fact that there was no general outcry against this blasphemous presumption (“I’m sorry | have to break yr neck, but it’s better all round, see?”) he found nauseating, intolerable, insanity. Like the fact public men and “serious newspapers” daily referred to nuclear war as a “possible alternative”. These thoughts he had for more than a decade during which he had been working on notes towards a tactical re-evaluation of the human process, an undertaking in which he felt himself and many of his contemporaries to be actively involved. For the individual, the problem was to make contact. Only then would:the power
wither in the hands of the zombies, those historical phenomena, dragging themselves upwards on the bootstraps of their symbols. To be in control, a man had to be able to transcend his symbols. There, if anywhere, was the direction of freedom, the only freedom that interested him ultimately, if not presently. To make contact with an “underground” army of generals who never wore a uniform. Humanity was in danger of being destroyed by its own symbols, the reality of the news
agencies having little to do with the reality of the human predicament. Too many improbables provoked fear, hysteria. It was from the hysteria of the United States that he fled.

He had returned via Montreal, the Newfoundland ice banks, round the north tip of Scotland, to the ancient granite city of Aberdeen, and thence via Glasgow (city of his unfortunate birth) to London, a thin grey figure, lamp-post or ghost, the idea of sigma, written thus: close under his eyelids, an electronic load, an unwritten book, a plan in four dimensions, a shadow one, including time, a communication from the sexistential maniac, taking as given that complex of informations called London, 1964, as a raw material for his engraver’s tool, and calling at last, finally, for poets’ rule.

“You will be aware”, said the Existential from his coffin or candybox, “that there are already three “pirate’ radio stations just outside the three-mile limit. What they broadcast is inoffensive, inert: the fact that ‘pirates’ are tolerated is vital…one of our recent tactical victories. We are planning a ‘voice’ now…”.  He went on to say that the bridgehead should be established.

“How many zealots could we have? At present we had nearly fifty thousand: sufficient for the day. It seemed the assets in this element of war were ours. If we realised our raw materials and were apt with them, then climate, railway, desert and technical weapons could also be attached to our interests. The Turks were stupid: the Germans behind them dogmatical. They would believe that rebellion was absolute like war, and dealt with it on the analogy of war. Analogy in human things was fudge,anyhow: and war upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”
T.E.Lawrence

I began writing the other day on sigma paper (| am now composing directly on the stencil). This decision pertained to some thoughts | had some time ago about anonymity. | quote: ”The ideal practical posture: concerning writing and the writer today: always to use company stationery for manuscripts, to remind him that when he is writing seriously, he is being written ‘through’ by something that is independent of his will, is a funnel (however individual) for a wisdom which only becomes his as he articulates it, for something transcending himself, the ‘company’ (God)”.

Those notes continue thus:-

“There is what is written seriously (at play, as you will), and a whole corpus of mongrel stuff: ‘literature’ is a good word for the latter (debased by its association with the vested interests which grew up around a profitable institution). The traditional categories differentiating the arts and their sub-specie, tending as they do to perpetuate the institutional, can for the moment only get in the way of creativity and our understanding of it. What they connote includes a number of important publishing houses and professional sinecures, and galleries into which most of the painters who are exhibited there wouldn’t have deigned to spit. That was the meaning of Dada, obscured by the expedient of filing it away amongst ‘schools’. If the arts are to be taken out of the hands of the. brokers (economic, political, academic), we must from the beginning have a care for our vocabulary…”

The techniques of subversion are relative to what is to be subverted, the Existential said more than once. He went on to say that of course that was a ‘dirty word. Sub is under like your arse. Subvert, subtract, subordinate, substitute, underhand, undermine, undertaker. Boooh. But the fact remained that that was precisely what had to be undertaken. Subversion. It was an abominable cowardice of men to act as though they had no notion nothing less, nothing less fundamental, “drastic” was enough. The so-called “seat-of-power” must shift. We must stop externalising it so absolutely. The power is in us, and we can use it together if we use our heads. We must do everything to attack the “enemy” at his base, within ourselves. We must take nothing for granted. Certainly not what men call the “state”.

The word “state” was well-chosen. A state is an existential absurdity. It seemed to the Existential we must stop thinking in terms of “present realities” and begin thinking in terms of the possible, as rigorous with ourselves when we examine our own motives as when we conduct a chemical experiment. There’s an old tired horse whose afraid to think in case he “loses” his job to a machine. We know that everything is conditioned and defend present conditions with a hedge of institutions which make the future without war we profess to want a scientific impossibility. Scared fat white pigs scream blue murder when you begin to attack their institutions. The fact that those institutions will ‘be irrelevant in any possible future, that they can only be prohibitive of that future’s becoming what-however it is, doesn’t register. “What will you put in its place?” they scream. The question is rhetorical. You want I should call for the police?

Who are we? And who are they? I find the implications of such words dubious for connotations beyond the geographical. Still, to paraphrase a sentence of T.E.Lawrence, the mark of nomadism, that most deep and biting social discipline, is on each one of us in his degree. We know where we are going. Or rather, each one of us knows what is the correct posture, which awareness is the only sign and badge of his election. We are concerned with the present and only by the way with a future ideal state (process) of society, the articulation of whose functions is forcedly terra incognita. We are all individuals and for each of us the problem is himself-in-the-present. It is not so much a question of choosing to co-operate as of discovering oneself in and of the invisible insurrection by virtue of one’s practical posture. The revolt is taking place at the level of symbols; there is no question of our ever meeting the forces of reaction head on in a war on their terms. It is happening. If you are aware of it, you are ipso facto involved, engage. If not, sleep in peace.

Alexander Trocchi

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