I just heard this interview with attorney Clarence Jones discussing his new book Behind The Dream about helping draft the speech that would become I Have A Dream. I know MLK day was yesterday, but I’m celebrating him all week.

Photo by Richard Avedon of MLK with his father and son in Atlanta, Georgia.

I’m kind of obsessed with The Penguin Great Ideas series and sad to report that they have just announced the end of this collection. I’m not sure what is better: the well-edited selection or the graphic design, which is total book porn. The slim volumes of important historical essays concerning politics, philosophy, nature, sex, science, war and religion are reprinted without all of the hoopla that tends to surround such historically important writing (three introductions, appendix, etc..) and the covers are raised, tactical bliss that makes you remember how good a book feels in your hands. Penguin has a long history of innovating the publishing world, including bringing paperbacks to the masses, employing high-end graphic designers, and even in the 1930′s creating a vending machine for books called “The Penguincubator.” I just snapped up a bunch of the Great Ideas at a book store this weekend and was curious about them so I started googling it and discovered that the fifth set of twenty was released this month rounding out an even 100 for those who like myself are not mathematically inclined. (Side note: If anyone wants to get the whole set for me for Christmas, I will kiss you. Many times.) An interesting thing is that considering the books are being sold individually the sales for each book are across the board with some surprisingly selling beyond expectations. The editor of the series, Simon Winder writes on the Penguin blog about releasing John Ruskin’s edition and selling 70,000 copies when Penguin can barely keep Ruskin’s titles in print. Here are some links to David Pearson’s website, the amazing graphic designer, with images of the first sixty books: Set One, Two and Three. I put up a few of my favorites.

As part of the PEN World Voices Festival, recent PEN winner and National Book Award Winner (as well as Dossier contributor) Sherman Alexie is lecturing at Cooper Union on May 2nd about the future of books in the digital age and the many threats the book industry faces. He has chosen not to let his books be available in digital form and has spoken out widely against the new technology. The lecture is titled “I, writer: The artistic, political and economic responsibilities of writers in the digital age.”

“As print publishing is rapidly changing, and radically altering what it means to be a writer, how should we respond? To survive, we will likely become dual citizens, continuing to live and write as analog artists, but also embracing and expanding the aesthetics of digital literature. As independent brick-and-mortar bookstores, with their commitment to liberal social responsibility, are replaced by online stores with libertarian ambitions, must writers seek to become more vocal advocates for other writers and social causes? Should writers, in order to protect their art and promote their politics, form a national union? In any case, we writers are facing an uncertain, potentially destructive, but ultimately challenging and exciting future.”
— Sherman Alexie

Word.
Tickets here.

Photo by Mike Urban

One of the most interesting demi-myths of contemporary politics concerns neoconservatism as an intellectual movement and its rumoured leftist heritage. Oft commented upon, the Trotskyist origins of some of its early thinkers (Irving Kristol, James Burnham), and an apparent debt displayed in its evangelical policies of aggressively exported global ideological revolution, meant that for disillusioned leftists bobbing about in the seemingly un-navigable tides of postmodern liberal democracy it recreated some of the old certainties: better to be on one side, even if it’s the wrong side, than no side at all. Indeed, though it begs the question somewhat, is this need for a coherent and familiar political narrative (radical youth jading into reactionary zeal) not entirely indicative of just such a shift, as evinced by figures like Christopher Hitchens and Kanan Makiya, that the desire to believe in this kind of myth demonstrates? This is part of exactly what is so impressive about the neoconservative project, the shamelessness of its authoritarian extremism. Leo Strauss made no bones about the need for an elite to create lies necessary to bind the republic to their will, and just what makes this principle so insidiously effective is the disengagement it correctly presumes, that the people will lap up the lie, because they too are lost without the old grand narratives of good versus evil.

All of which leads me to one of the areas that this manoeuvre makes itself most frequently apparent: language. The ideological reorientation of words traditionally associated with the progressive and emancipatory realm of political expression is something of which we see an ever increasing amount, and to which we seem to unable to formulate a staunch response. The excellent new book from the London-based academic Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, hones in on a particular facet this broad problem, and tackles it head on, armed with voluble wit, confidence and clarity of thought. We are dealing with “a fundamental crisis in the meaning of the word. If ‘feminism’ can mean anything from behaving like a man ([Jacques-Alain] Miller), being pro-choice ([Jessica] Valenti), being pro-life ([Sarah] Palin), and being pro-war (the Republican administration), then we may simply need to abandon the term, or at the very least, restrict its usage to those situations in which we make quite certain we explain what we mean by it”.

I’m aware that by contextualising the book in this way I’m performing a typical misogynist denial of the importance and specificity of feminism by making it part of the universal narrative of emancipation. For this I apologise, with the caveat that this is exactly what Power is doing, in reverse. By relocating feminism firmly back within this narrative, as she does in the first half of the text, she mounts a trenchant defence of the term from those who would use it for their own ends, as in the case of Palin, whose feminist belief in non-violence (all three of those terms so laughably questionable I’ve only resisted the urge to ring-fence each in a squall of ugly inverted commas by an act of tremendous willpower) finds expression only in her concern towards the unborn, or the Bush administration, who regularly invoked the lack of women’s rights over there in the middle east as another perfectly good reason for bombing them a lot. With great ease she thus demonstrates exactly why the coalition of the “Mawkish and Hawkish” can make no claim to the term, thereby locking out two of the four instances of troublesome reappropriation in one.

This astute dismissal of the claims of the right to the term sets up the rest of the text, which broadly concerns itself with the two remaining contested meanings and the one underlying major one, so far unmentioned. Over a series of quickfire chapters in which she engages with sex, fashion, the hijab, pornography and monogamy, she demonstrates that contemporary feminism must neither be about behaving like men nor imitating the characters of Sex & The City, while setting up her central point, which concerns political economy. On the one hand attacking the ‘feminization’ of the labour market, in which employment opportunities increasingly resemble those initially determined for women, all temporary contracts and zero benefits, she uses the other to cohere all the above arguments into an engaging critique of contemporary capitalism.

Part of an ongoing series published by zero books, which also includes Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism and David Stubbs’ excellent Fear of Music (subtitled why people get Rothko but don’t get Stockhausen and reviewed here by Andrew Lison), One Dimensional Woman doesn’t posture. Both highly provocative and eminently sensible, Power’s 81 pager demands to be snapped up and passed about. Highly recommended.

The following text is the introduction to The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, published this month by Semiotext(e) and available online as a pdf. The book was originally published in France following the riots in the Parisian suburbs, and across Europe, in 2005.  Almost two months ago we posted an incredible clip of Glenn Beck of Fox News attacking this “dangerous book”.

Everyone agrees. It’s about to explode. It is acknowledged, with a serious and self-important look, in the corridors of the Assembly, just as yesterday it was repeated in the cafes. There is a certain pleasure in calculating the risks. Already, we are presented with a detailed menu of preventive measures for securing the territory. The New Years festivities take a decisive turn—”Next year there’ll be no oysters, enjoy them while you can!” To prevent the celebrations from being totally eclipsed by the traditional disorder, 36,000 cops and 16 helicopters are rushed out by Alliot-Marie[1]—the same clown who, during the high school demonstrations in December, tremulously watched for the slightest sign of a Greek contamination, readying the police apparatus just in case. We can discern more clearly every day, beneath the reassuring drone, the noise of preparations for open war. It’s impossible to ignore its cold and pragmatic implementation, no longer even bothering to present itself as an operation of pacification.

The newspapers conscientiously draw up the list of causes for die sudden disquiet. There is the financial crisis, of course, with its booming unemployment, its share of hopelessness and of social plans, its Kerviel and Madoff scandals. There is the failure of the educational system, its dwindling production of workers and citizens, even with the children of the middle class as its raw material. There is the existence of a youth to which no political representation corresponds, a youth good for nothing but destroying the free bicycles that society so conscientiously put at their disposal.  

None of these worrisome subjects should appear insurmountable in an era whose predominant mode of government is precisely the management of crises. Unless we consider that what power is confronting is neither just another crisis, nor just a succession of chronic problems, of more or less anticipated disturbances, but a singular peril: that a form of conflict has emerged, and positions have been taken up, that are no longer manageable.

Those who everywhere make up this peril have to ask themselves more than the trifling questions about causes, or the probabilities of inevitable movements and confrontations. They need to ask how, for instance, does the Greek chaos resonate in the French situation? An uprising here cannot be the simple transposition of what happened over there. Global civil war still has its local specificities. In France a situation of generalized rioting would provoke an explosion of another tenor.

The Greek rioters are faced with a weak state, while being able to take advantage of a strong popularity. One must not forget that it was against the Regime of the Colonels that, only thirty years ago, democracy reconstituted itself on the basis of a practice of political violence. This violence, whose memory is not so distant, still seems intuitive to most Greeks. Even the leaders of the socialist party have thrown a molotov or two in their youth. Yet classical politics is equipped with variants diat know very well how to accommodate these practices and to extend their ideological rubbish to the very heart of the riot. If the Greek battle wasn’t decided, and put down, in the streets— die police being visibly outflanked there—it’s because its neutralization was played out elsewhere. There is nothing more draining, nothing more fatal, than this classical politics, with its dried up rituals, its thinking without thought, its litde closed world.

In France, our most exalted socialist bureaucrats have never been anything other than shriveled husks filling up the halls of the Assembly. Here everything conspires to annihilate even the slightest form of political intensity. Which means that it is always possible to oppose the citizen to the delinquent in a quasi-linguistic operation that goes hand in hand with quasi-military operations. The riots of November 2005 and, in a different context, the social movements in the autumn of 2007, have already provided several precedents. The image of right wing students in Nanterre applauding as the police expelled their classmates offers a small glimpse of what the future holds in store. It goes without saying that the attachment of the French to the state—the guarantor of universal values, the last rampart against the disaster—is a pathology that is difficult to undo. It’s above all a fiction that no longer knows how to carry on. Our governors themselves increasingly consider it as a useless encumbrance because they, at least, take the conflict for what it is— militarily. They have no complex about sending in elite antiterrorist units to subdue riots, or to liberate a recycling center occupied by its workers. As the welfare state collapses, we see the emergence of a brute conflict between those who desire order and those who don’t. Everything that French politics has been able to deactivate is in the process of unleashing itself. It will never be able to process all that it has repressed. In the advanced degree of social decomposition, we can count on the coming movement to find the necessary breath of nihilism. Which will not mean that it won’t be exposed to other limits.

Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire—a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable.

When we speak of Empire we name the mechanisms of power that preventively and surgically stifle any revolutionary potential in a situation. In this sense, Empire is not an enemy that confronts us head-on. It is a rhythm that imposes itself, a way of dispensing and dispersing reality. Less an order of the world than its sad, heavy and militaristic liquidation.

What we mean by the party of insurgents is the sketching out of a completely othercomposition, an other side of reality, which from Greece to the French banlieues[2] is seeking its consistency.

It is now publicly understood that crisis situations are so many opportunities for the restructuring of domination. This is why Sarkozy can announce, without seeming to lie too much, that the financial crisis is “the end of a world,” and that 2009 will see France enter a new era. This charade of an economic crisis is supposed to be a novelty: we are supposed to be in the dawn of a new epoch where we will all join together in fighting inequality and global warming. But for our generation—which was born in the crisis and has known nothing but economic, financial, social and ecological crisis—this is rather difficult to accept. They won’t fool us again, with another round of “Now we start all over again” and “It’s just a question of tightening our belts for a little while.” To tell the truth, the disastrous unemployment figures no longer arouse any feeling in us. Crisis is a means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse.

What this war is being fought over is not various ways of managing society, but irreducible and irreconcilable ideas of happiness and their worlds. We know it, and so do the powers that be. The militant remnants that observe us—always more numerous, always more identifiable—are tearing out their hair trying to fit us into litde compartments in their little heads. They hold out their arms to us the better to suffocate us, with their failures, their paralysis, their stupid problematics. From elections to “transitions,” militants will never be anything other than that which distances us, each time a little farther, from the possibility of communism. Luckily we will accommodate neither treason nor deception for much longer.

The past has given us far too many bad answers for us not to see that the mistakes were in the questions themselves. There is no need to choose between the fetishism of spontaneity and organizational control; between the “come one, come all” of activist networks and the discipline of hierarchy; between acting desperately now and waiting desperately for later; between bracketing that which is to be lived and experimented in the name of a paradise that seems more and more like a hell the longer it is put off, and repeating, with a corpse-filled mouth, that planting carrots is enough to dispel this nightmare.

Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.

In truth, diere is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we are becoming. Organizations— political or labor, fascist or anarchist—always begin by separating, practically, these aspects of existence. It’s then easy for them to present their idiotic formalism as the sole remedy to this separation. To organize is not to give a structure to weakness. It is above all to form bonds—bonds that are by no means neutral—terrible bonds. The degree of organization is measured by the intensity of sharing—material andspiritual.

From now on, to materially organize for survival is to materially organize for attack. Everywhere, a new idea of communism is to be elaborated. In the shadows of bar rooms, in print shops, squats, farms, occupied gymnasiums, new complicities are to be born. These precious connivances must not be refused the necessary means for the deployment of their forces.

Here lies the truly revolutionary potentiality of the present. The increasingly frequent skirmishes have this formidable quality: that they are always an occasion for complicities of this type, sometimes ephemeral, but sometimes also unbetrayable. When a few thousand young people find the determination to assail this world, you’d have to be as stupid as a cop to seek out a financial trail, a leader, or a snitch.

Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the most extreme alienations—from our selves, from others, from worlds. The fiction of the individual has decomposed at the same speed that it was becoming real. Children of the metropolis, we offer this wager: that it’s in the most profound deprivation of existence, perpetually stifled, perpetually conjured away, that the possibility of communism resides.

When all is said and done, it’s with an entire anthropology that we are at war. With the very idea of man.

Communism then, as presupposition and as experiment. Sharing of a sensibility andelaboration of sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the building of a force. Communism as the matrix of a meticulous, audacious assault on domination. As a call and as a name for all worlds resisting imperial pacification, all solidarities irreducible to the reign of commodities, all friendships assuming the necessities of war. COMMUNISM. We know it’s a term to be used with caution. Not because, in die great parade of words, it may no longer be very fashionable. But because our worst enemies have used it, and continue to do so. We insist. Certain words are like battlegrounds: their meaning, revolutionary or reactionary, is a victory, to be torn from the jaws of struggle.

Deserting classical politics means facing up to war, which is also situated on the terrain of language. Or rather, in the way that words, gestures and life are inseparably linked. If one puts so much effort into imprisoning as terrorists a few young communists who are supposed to have participated in publishing The Coming Insurrection, it is not because of a “thought crime,” but rather because they might embody a certain consistency between acts and thought. Something which is rarely treated with leniency.

What these people are accused of is not to have written a book, nor even to have physically attacked the sacrosanct flows that irrigate the metropolis. It’s that they might possibly have confronted these flows with the density of a political thought and position. That an act could have made sense according to another consistency of the world than the deserted one of Empire. Anti-terrorism claims to attack the possible future of a “criminal association.” But what is really being attacked is the future of the situation. The possibility that behind every grocer a few bad intentions are hiding, and behind every thought, the acts that it calls for. The possibility expressed by an idea of politics—anonymous but welcoming, contagious and uncontrollable—which cannot be relegated to the storeroom of freedom of expression.

There remains scarcely any doubt that youth will be the first to savagely confront power. These last few years, from the riots of Spring 2001 in Algeria to those of December 2008 in Greece, are nothing but a series of warning signs in this regard. Those who 30 or 40 years ago revolted against their parents will not hesitate to reduce this to a conflict between generations, if not to a predictable symptom of adolescence.

The only future of a “generation” is to be the preceding one. On a route that leads inevitably to the cemetery.

Tradition would have it that everything begins with a “social movement.” Especially at a moment when the left, which has still not finished decomposing, hypocritically tries to regain its credibility in the streets. Except that in the streets it no longer has a monopoly. Just look at how, with each new mobilization of high school students—as with everything the left still dares to support—a rift continually widens between their whining demands and the level of violence and determination of the movement.

From this rift we must make a trench.

If we see a succession of movements hurrying one after the other, without leaving anything visible behind them, it must nonetheless be admitted that something persists. A powder trail links what in each event has not let itself be captured by the absurd temporality of the withdrawal of a new law, or some other pretext. In fits and starts, and in its own rhythm, we are seeing something like a force take shape. A force that does not serve its time but imposes it, silently.

It is no longer a matter of foretelling the collapse or depicting the possibilities of joy. Whether it comes sooner or later, the point is to prepare for it. It’s not a question of providing a schema for what an insurrection should be, but of taking the possibility of an uprising for what it never should have ceased being: a vital impulse of youth as much as a popular wisdom. If one knows how to move, the absence of a schema is not an obstacle but an opportunity. For the insurgents, it is the sole space that can guarantee the essential: keeping the initiative. What remains to be created, to be tended as one tends a fire, is a certain outlook, a certain tactical fever, which once it has emerged, even now, reveals itself as determinant—and a constant source of determination. Already certain questions have been revived that only yesterday may have seemed grotesque or outmoded; they need to be seized upon, not in order to respond to them definitively, but to make them live. Having posed them anew is not the least of the Greek uprising’s virtues:

How does a situation of generalized rioting become an insurrectionary situation? What to do once the streets have been taken, once the police have been soundly defeated there? Do the parliaments still deserve to be attacked? What is the practical meaning of deposing power locally? How do we decide? How do we subsist?

How do we find each other?

— Invisible Committee, January 2009

[2] Banlieue—French ghettoes, usually located in the suburban periphery.

There is a moment in The Meaning of Sarkozy when prominent French philosopher Alain Badiou brings up Sarkozy’s critique of May 1968 in France.  Sarkozy famously argued that the radical movement blurred the lines between good and evil; to Badiou, however, May 1968 is notable for clearly articulating differences between good and evil.  This book is Badiou’s attempt to draw a line in the sand once again.

The Meaning of Sarkozy opens in the run-up to the 2007 French presidential election: a gloomy moment for left-leaning French citizens, as they waited for Badiou’s “rat man,” “Sarkozy l’américain,” to trample over weak-kneed socialist candidate Ségolène Royal.  Badiou describes the presidential race as a choice between “fear” (“the twitchy accountant” Sarkozy) and “fear of fear” (the “hazy bourgeoise” Royal); fear, as we know, won the day.  But Badiou is less interested here in analyzing that fear and where it comes from than in taking on the leftist malaise that came to a head in France in 2007.  For in The Meaning of Sarkozy Badiou takes what he calls “depression” and fights it with all the force that a dedicated soixante-huitard can muster.

The text can be divided into two parts.  The first is shorter, and it deals with the question put forth in Badiou’s title: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (which translates somewhat awkwardly in English to “of what is Sarkozy the name?”).  Badiou’s answer here is relatively simple, for it takes Sarkozy at his own words when, during his election campaign, he famously attacked the legacy of May 1968 in France, advocating a “liquidation” of the movement once and for all.  This is what Sarko represents, then.  Not just global finance or capitalist order, but a world in which there is no other possibility, where emancipation is worse than impossible, worse than criminal.

Having outlined this bleak prospect, for the rest of the book Badiou sketches an emancipatory politics or, as he boldly puts it, a “communist hypothesis,” that he resolutely refuses to think of as dead.   Frankly taking it for granted that communism (which, he notes, “is what Kant called an ‘Idea’, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme”) is the right hypothesis, Badiou is brilliant at getting across what is at stake in abandoning emancipatory determination: “Sartre said in an interview, which I paraphrase: if the communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not practicable, well, that means that humanity is not a thing in itself, not very different from ants or termites.  What did he mean by that? If competition, the ‘free market’, the sum of little pleasures, and the walls that protect you from the desire of the weak, are the alpha and omega of all collective and private existence, then the human animal is not worth a cent.”  For Badiou the communist hypothesis represents the hope that humanity can overcome subordination, division of labor, and class structure; all that is left after such a hypothesis, then, is animality; in such a scenario the philosopher would have no function.

Like much of Badiou’s work, the book has been criticized as overly abstract, but this abstractness is rooted more in the fact that Badiou is explicitly writing in opposition to what he calls “repetition” than any lack of intellectual rigor or radical commitment.  Badiou’s hope is to posit something else, “a Real woven out of the impossible,” a new communist ideology that can oppose the capitalist order, rather than something like “the reconstruction of the Left” or the “reform of the Socialist Party.”  This is a notoriously hard space to navigate, and it’s probably unfair to fault Badiou for not offering any concrete model for a new emancipatory politics in this thin volume.  If Badiou offers no five-step plan for something new, moreover, it comes across as more of an advantage than not: throughout the text the closer he gets to anything prescriptive, the more he falters (see his suggestive but generally clumsy sections on “the foreigner”).  Indeed, if just for bravely and lucidly reminding his reader of the stakes of any real malaise, his attempt to fight leftist depression and disenchantment is an eminently useful endeavor.

Alain Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy is out now in hardcover, published by Verso.  Badiou gave a somewhat awkward interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk back in March that is now online at google video.

On Wednesday Fox New’s Glenn Beck launched into a wonderful tirade against The Coming Insurrectionby the anonymous Invisible Committee, a “dangerous book” about to be published in English by Semiotext(e)/MIT Press.  Originally published in French in 2007, it has since been used as a crucial piece of evidence against the so-called Tarnac 9 in a controversial anti-terrorism trial in France, with the accused having received support from a myriad of intellectuals including Judith Butler, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben (whose work, particularly The Coming Community, has been influential for the group), and more.  Over a month before the book is actually published, an unauthorized launch at the Union Square Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago came to the attention of the NY Times.

Europe is on the brink of social collapse and/or revolution while the Japanese are forming unions!  While Beck was trying to work his viewers into a frenzy over the growing danger of the ultra-left, his rant was an incredible advertisement for the book, which I immediately download as a pdf here.  As Savonarola at the Institute for Conjectural Research put it to me in an email: “As Neocons go dada, detourning the detourners – my mind is blown. Is Glenn Beck part of some kind of situationist ‘sleeper cell’?”

I haven’t gotten a chance to read the actual book yet, but Alberto Toscano’s analysis and critique from the journal Radical Philosophy, which also provides a history of the court case, is highly recommended.

SIRE, I AM FROM THE OTHER COUNTRY

We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:

Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Saint Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street

And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.

And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.

And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.

The hacienda must be built.

All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. There was a certain charm in horses born from the sea or magical dwarves dressed in gold, but they are in no way adapted to the demands of modern life. For we are in the twentieth century, even if few people are aware of it. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.

We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.

We propose to invent new, changeable decors.

* * *

We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s style to him, a style suitable for factories and hospitals, and no doubt eventually for prisons. (Doesn’t he already build churches?) Some sort of psychological repression dominates this individual — whose face is as ugly as his conceptions of the world — such that he wants to squash people under ignoble masses of reinforced concrete, a noble material that should rather be used to enable an aerial articulation of space that could surpass the flamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizing influence is immense. A Le Corbusier model is the only image that arouses in me the idea of immediate suicide. He is destroying the last remnants of joy. And of love, passion, freedom.

* * *

Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.

The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.

Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in fulfilling them.

The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be both a means of knowledge and a means of action.

Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their appearance will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants.

* * *

A new architecture can express nothing less than a new civilization (it is clear that there has been neither civilization nor architecture for centuries, but only experiments, most of which were failures; we can speak of Gothic architecture, but there is no Marxist or capitalist architecture, though these two systems are revealing similar tendencies and goals).

Anyone thus has the right to ask us on what vision of civilization we are going to found an architecture. I briefly sketch the points of departure for a civilization:

— A new conception of space (a religious or nonreligious cosmogony).

— A new conception of time (counting from zero, various modes of temporal development).

— A new conception of behaviors (moral, sociological, political, legal; economy is only a part of the laws of behavior accepted by a civilization).

Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute truth and incontrovertible mythical exemplars. The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization (although I’m not satisfied with that word; I mean that it will be more flexible, more “playful”). (For a long time it was believed that the Marxist countries were on this path. We now know that this endeavor followed the old normal evolution, arriving in record time at a rigidification of its doctrines and at forms that have become ossified in their decadence. A renewal is perhaps possible, but I will not examine this question here.)

On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to an ultimate mythic synthesis.

* * *

A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.

This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.

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Guy Debord has already pointed out the construction of situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. This need for totalcreation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space. One example will suffice to demonstrate this — a leaflet distributed in the street by the Palais de Paris (manifestations of the collective unconscious always correspond to the affirmations of creators):

BYGONE NEIGHBORHOODS
Grand Events
PERIOD MUSIC
LUMINOUS EFFECTS

PARIS BY NIGHT

C O M P L E T E L Y   A N I M A T E D

The Court of Miracles: an impressive 300-square-meter reconstruction of a Medieval neighborhood, with rundown houses inhabited by robbers, beggars, bawdy wenches, all subjects of the frightful KING OF THIEVES, who renders justice from his lair.

The Tower of Nesle: The sinister Tower profiles its imposing mass against the somber, dark-clouded sky. The Seine laps softly. A boat approaches. Two assassins await their victim. . . .⁽²⁾

De Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space.

We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)

In De Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums. De Chirico could have been given free reign over Place de la Concorde and its Obelisk, or at least commissioned to design the gardens that “adorn” several entrances to the capital.

This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities specifically established for this purpose, cities bringing together — in addition to the facilities necessary for basic comfort and security — buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces and events, past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.

Everyone will, so to speak, live in their own personal “cathedrals.” There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers.

This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese gardens that create optical illusions — with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time — or with the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which (height of absurdity, Ariadne unemployed) is the sign: No playing in the labyrinth.

This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. But this theoretical phase is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle but which could preserve and enhance the Castle poetic power (by the conservation of a strict minimum of lines, the transposition of certain others, the positioning of openings, the topographical location, etc.).

The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life.

Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) — Sinister Quarter, etc. And an Astrolarium which would group plant species in accordance with the relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a Planetary Garden along the lines the astronomer Thomas wants to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as to have somewhere to live in peace — I’m thinking here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.

The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to get into, with a hideous decor (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures, power-driven mobiles, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it was blindingly lit during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the “Square of the Appalling Mobile.” Saturation of the market with a product causes the product’s market value to fall: thus, as they explored the Sinister Quarter, children would learn not to fear the anguishing occasions of life, but to be amused by them.

The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation.

Couples will no longer pass their nights in the home where they live and receive guests, which is nothing but a banal social custom. The chamber of love will be more distant from the center of the city: it will naturally recreate for the partners a sense of exoticism in a locale less open to light, more hidden, so as to recover the atmosphere of secrecy. The opposite tendency, seeking a center of thought, will proceed through the same technique.

Later, as the activities inevitably grow stale, this drifting will partially leave the realm of direct experience for that of representation.

Note: A certain Saint-Germain-des Prés, about which no one has yet written, has been the first group functioning on a historical scale within this ethic of drifting. Thismagical group spirit, which has remained underground up till now, is the only explanation for the enormous influence that a mere three city blocks have had on the world, an influence that others have inadequately attempted to explain on the basis of styles of clothing and song, or even more stupidly by the neighborhood’s supposedly freer access to prostitution (and Pigalle?).

In forthcoming books we will elucidate the coincidence and incidences of the Saint-Germain days (Henry de Béarn’s The New Nomadism, Guy Debord’s Beautiful Youth,etc.). This should serve to clarify not only an “aesthetic of behaviors” but practical means for forming new groups, and above all a complete phenomenology of couples, encounters and duration which mathematicians and poets will study with profit.

Finally, to those who object that a people cannot live by drifting, it is useful to recall that in every group certain characters (priests or heroes) are charged with representing various tendencies as specialists, in accordance with the dual mechanism of projection and identification. Experience demonstrates that a dérive is a good replacement for a Mass: it is more effective in making people enter into communication with the ensemble of energies, seducing them for the benefit of the collectivity.

The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas — and of Reno, that caricature of free love — though they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.

Ivan Chtcheglov (1933-1998), also known as Gilles Ivain, wrote ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ when he was nineteen as a member of the Letterist International, one of the avant garde groups that went on to form the Situationist International in 1957.  Despite being kicked out of the group in 1954, this text was printed in the first issue of the Situationist’s journal and it has been extremely influential.  An abridged version of the text has circulated in English for years but this, the complete version, was recently translated by Ken Knabb at Bureau of Public Secrets.  Top image of Postman Cheval‘s absolutely incredible Le Palais Idéal taken from here.

This week Sweden’s Pirate Party won a seat in the European Parliament, receiving over 7% of the Swedish vote.  The party was created on the first day of 2006 with a platform based on the desire “to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected”.  The Swedish police’s raid on the torrent-sharing website the Pirate Bay raised the party’s profile in the public eye and its membership numbers have risen considerably since.  It is now the third largest political party in Sweden (in terms of members) and its youth organization Ung Pirat is Sweden’s largest political youth organization.  Here, in an editorial originally published in the Swedish tabloid Expressen before the election, the Swedish novelist, poet, and scholar Lars Gustafsson explains why he voted for the Pirate Party.

According to a source from antiquity, the Emperor of Persia is said to have ordered the flogging of the sea because its waves were preventing him from transporting his troops by boat during a storm. That was stupid of him. Today he might have gone to Stockholm’s District Court, perhaps after a consultative conservation with a judge?

It is strange how strongly the struggle for civil rights in the spring of 2009 is reminiscent of the battles over the freedom of the press in France during the decades that preceded the French Revolution. A new world of ideas is emerging and it wouldn’t be possible without the ever increasingly speed of technological developments. In France there were raids on underground printing houses, confiscated publications and – even more damaging – the confiscation of printing equipment. Arrest warrants and daring nightly shipments between Paris and the Prussian enclave Neuchâtel, where not only a large percentage of the Encyclopedia was produced, but also, alongside of atheist pamphlets, a considerable amount of risqué pornography. Between around 1730 and 1780, the number of state censors in France quadrupled and raids against the illegal printing houses rose at about the same rate. As we know now, it didn’t help. On the contrary, the extensive censorship and repeated raids appear to have actually stimulated the new ideas and their propagation.

Today it is the Internet’s continued existence as a forum for ideas and as an institution for the promotion of the rights of the citizen, protected against infringements on privacy and from powerful special interests. The fact that a crazy Franco-German proposal has just failed in the European Parliament does not mean that net-freedom and integrity are now safeguarded by any means.

How substantial, then, are these threats? Let us think of the River Dalälv in Ludvika, Sweden during the spring flood season. In a really wet year – when the waters can rise over 100 meters, even 200 meters, flooding homes and meadows – does it help to call the Ludvika police? Up to the present the majority of historical experience has demonstrated that legislation has never been able to stop technological development.

In 1935 Walter Benjamin published an influential essay whose title is usually translated as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, where he comes to a series of interesting conclusions about consequences of the radical changes being brought about by developments in his time’s relatively modest means of reproduction. The digital revolution has brought about a reproducibility that Walter Benjamin could hardly have dreamt of. One could perhaps speak of “maximum reproducibility”. Google is assembling a library that, if it is allowed to develop, is going to make the majority of material libraries obsolete, or in any case antiquated. The cinema and printed magazines and newspapers have been drawn into this new immateriality for quite a while.

Films, novels, magazines, and newspapers are reproducible. And that’s not all; even three-dimensional objects, for example products from programmable lathes, can easily be reproduced, wirelessly and rapidly. This immaterialization naturally threatens Jan Guillou [a best selling Swedish author] and maybe a dozen other authors’ ability to acquire new mansions: a social problem that I quite frankly would bid a fond farewell.

Intellectual property rights have much more serious aspects than these, however. What have the patents of large pharmaceutical firms on HIV and AIDS medicine meant for the third world? Or what about Monsanto’s claim on the material copyright to species of frogs and pigs?

Life in society demands a balance between different interests and all the insincere attempts to ignore this are nonsense. A functioning national defense is more important than ice hockey rinks and bicycle lanes. Presumably the Internet contains a threat against the material copyright. So what?

Intellectual and personal integrity for citizens – simply put, an Internet that has not been transformed into a channel for the authorities or heavily lobbied for judicial judgments and docile EU politicians – is considerably more important than the need for a primarily industrial literature or music scene whose commodities are pulped, recycled and forgotten already within the copyright owner’s own lifetime. The need to be read, to influence, to participate in the formulation of one’s present, does not necessarily come into conflict with the desire to shift units, although it can. When a conflict does arise here, the industrial interest must give way and the intellectual sphere of art must be defended against anything and everything that threatens it.

The essential interest for artists and writers who are intellectually and morally serious about their work naturally must be to be read, to make themselves heard by their own generation. How one is read, that is to say how one reaches one’s readers, is from this perspective secondary.

The growing defense of the expansive freedom of expression on the Internet – of immaterial civil rights – that we now see in country after country, is the beginning of a liberalism borne from technology and therefore liberated – precisely like in the 18^th century. That’s why I am voting for the Pirate Party.

Image on front page by cybriks. Translated by Jeff Kinkle.