.12. Ready steady go! - The celebration of passion and resistance

Assuming control over creativity and productivity:

Words and images, which surround us constantly - more now than ever - are the language of power. We are totally inundated with commercials and propaganda, everywhere. It's not manipulation, nor a conspiracy. It's the expression of a paradigm which has cast its web over the globe - formulating divisions of labour, using and shaping 'culture', ensuring its evolution, and thus contradicting itself through exploitation and alienation. The paradigm is ours, as is the language, and the imagery which represents it. Alienation is for everyone now, because it is now more than it ever was. It is total. Some won't recognise it, and others revel in it, but all of us feel it. It's easy to be attuned to it in the working class or as a student - it feels like total futility. One is more attuned to alienation when one can't afford to fool and distract themselves with bourgeois luxury, or in the converse, when, through education, one is purchasing boredom and functionalist thoughts in hopes of empowering their life. Will it? Only in so much as you can transcend it - only in its negation. The purpose of being a student now is to redefine that role. In a sense, to use creative and productive energy in opposition to the social forces that seek to harness it for a benefit alienated from yourself. The same applies to broader society. There is a practical manner in which we can combat total alienation - using its means against itself. That is using the means of creativity and productivity against the social paradigm that guides them. As for creative power, we can start with language and images. Every word, image, phrase or scene has a contrasting counterpart which can alter its meaning entirely and critique it. Dada knew it and accordingly was a fantastic reflection and critique of society. Drink from the toilet. Warhol knew it when he painted Monroe's lips a hundred times. The Situationalists articulated it and lived it (and not only in Paris 1968). The word 'propaganda' condescends the concept we're referring to, although to a degree that's what it is. To use this word in its condescending sense is to fail to recognise that everything is or can be propaganda. A more appropriate concept is that of 'satire'. We can stifle the alienation of our creative power through critique, humiliation, insult and self-criticism. Its object should be larger than its subject however: to redefine and reorganise the social control over creative and productive forces in opposition to alienation. After the critique of creative power we are left with the practical side of our social life production. The DIY festival is a powerful example of the assumption of productive organisation on the part of the political community. Insurrection is its broader social counterpart. The former redefines productive energy in its own terms, taking massive organisation into its own hands (even if its goal is only a forum for boring music), while the latter is popular resistance and refusal of the control over creative and productive power. What's next? Is the DIY festival followed by the creation of our own airlines, and is insurrection followed by revolution? If alienation stifles and co-opts creative and productive energy for its own benefit, then satire, self-reliance and resistance redefine them in rejection of alienation.

Much more can be said on these matter. Go ahead.

-The Black Mask Sub-committee of Violence and passion.