Matthew
Fuller, London
On The Road
(this
talk was given in Zurich)
Any article on environmental change should start off with an impressively
mind-numbing statistic to set the tone. According to Winfried Wolf, author
of Car Mania, (Pluto Press) since the invention of the car, about 25 million
people have been killed by traffic. Wolf recounts a World Health Organisation
statistic which states that, about 250 000 people die on the world's roads
every year. Half of those killed by cars are not drivers. In Britain,
according to Wolf, those outside cars have a fatality rate per kilometre
travelled 18 times higher than those in cars. In the same country, on
July 21st 1996, a motorway (equivalent to a U.S. freeway) was taken over
by ten thousand people and turned into a party. The metamorphosis from
strip of noisy, dangerous tarmac to full-on festival was instigated by
the London end of a loose network of groups called Reclaim The Streets.
The stretch of motorway was part of the M41 linking two normally busy
junctions in London's Shepherd's Bush area. At mid-day, hundreds of people
brought together by posters, flyers and word-of-mouth had met outside
Liverpool Street Station, almost the opposite end of the capital, but
linked by underground train. Several trains were filled with party-goers.
A game of cat and mouse developed above, as well as under ground with
the police trying to double-guess the venue for the blockade party as
a group of five hundred or so cyclists moved through the streets Critical
Mass style, snaring up the traffic as, led by only a couple of people
who knew the actual destination, they made their way towards the location.
As the first groups of people made it from the exit of the tube and walked
a little way up the road, they were greeted by the sight of lines of cops.
Themselves already effectively blocking the road, which was now beginning
to emerge as a playground for the already arrived cyclists and three or
four trucks, piled high with the stacks of some techno and trance sound
systems. The sheer numbers of people arriving forced the cops to back
down and et the occupation go ahead. Enormous, beautifully custom-made
colourful banners were stretched from lamp-posts high across the full
six-lanewidth of the road. A great mound of sand was deposited in the
middle of the fast lane and turned into a children's play area. Two giant
drag queens glided about on their scaffolding underskirts, six metres
high, and as the crowds sprawled in the sun and covered the road, music
began to blast out across the tarmac and the dancing bodies. Whilst J.G.
Ballard's 'Crash', plunges into the depths of one mutant use of the somewhat
ironically named communications infrastructure, this street party gave
a full work out to another: push out the traffic, take the streets back
for living in. As a leaflet given out on the day asserted. "We are basically
about taking back public space >from the enclosed private arena. At its
simplest it is an attack on cars as a principle agent of enclosure. It's
about reclaiming the streets as public inclusive space from the private
exclusive use of the car. But we believe in this as a broader principle,
taking back those thing that have been enclosed within capitalist circulation
and returning them to collective use as a commons."
An interview made with Mark and Marcia of Reclaim The Streets some weeks after the street party on the M21 gives some background to the events, and to the wider area of the environmental direct action movement in the UK. The group started four years ago, and was originally a spin-off from the London Cycling Campaign, a rather sedate organisation mainly focused on pushing for increasing provision for cyclists within the city. At around the same time a ground swell of opposition to a government policy of building roads with minimum public consultation or regard for environmental imperatives was increasingly meeting with active opposition. Around the country cross-class coalitions of activists and locals although often fraught with contradictions were making the continued dictation of national transport policy by the road lobby more and more untenable. With the government this year being forced to radically trim its spending on new roads and one major contractor even refusing to bid for the contract to build a highly controversial by-pass around Newbury this wave of protest and direct action is reaping definite results. This aside from the millions of pounds wasted on policing, security and the repair of damage to property and plant. Alongside these often rurally based struggles there has been an increasing development of an understanding of transport issues within urban contexts. This need to situate politics also in the areas where most people live is supplemented by the experience of squatting and of the criminalisation of travellers and raves under the notorious Criminal Justice Act. That Reclaim The Streets focus their actions on the effect of cars in cities has worked very well because it spins in off so many directions. The car is a key symbolic site for moral panics in Britain. Whilst every night, on roads all across the country, joyriders and police battle it out for supremacy on the roads, the car "Which promises individual freedom" and, "ends up guaranteeing noise, motorways, asthma and pollution for al" functions as both one of the most potent symbols and actual dynamic parts of capitalism. Marcia: "Focusing then just on the car as a means of getting to other problems to start challenging other systems, and other institutions. And the car's just brilliant because it represents the lie of freedom and the lie of choice and the lie of wealth." Mark: "It takes up vast amounts of land. It takes up the cleanness of the air. You know you've got the wound up windows in the face of interaction. People don't have to look at anybody else they can just get into their car, drive along they don't see anything. It's an incredible focus for the situation that capitalism's got us into." Marcia: "It's also part of their measurement of growth isn't it. It's sort of 'Buy more cars' you know, the economy's doing well, we're alright!' It's the whole angle of consumerism, 'We must increase profits!' which obviously then translates into increased consumption - and from that, consumption of the Earth's resources." Mark: "Earn, Spend, Earn, Spend' Marcia: "But now it's even, earn, spend, borrow, earn, spend, borrow. It's a farce." Mark: "There is a much greater problem. There's the exploitation of the earth and hand in hand with that is the exploitation of each other. And that's a global thing. It's the way success is continually measured on a monetary level" Indeed romance has fled the car, as gloriously tailfinned excess has been replaced by the discretely expensive or functional as the style of choice, with the most desirable of vehicles aiming merely for a noticeable anonymity. For Reclaim The Streets though, this is somewhat less of a problem than that ensconsed in their small speeding substitute worlds, drivers are amputated from, and contribute to the destruction of any possible creative sociability, from community. For Reclaim The Streets, the car is an expression of a much deeper problem and as such, an increasingly visible faultline in the logic of a system in which, "The only way we can change is to take power from the politicians. The politicians have forgotten us. They don't care about us. They care about the multinationals, the conglomerates and oil." Mark: "Speaking for England, for the past twenty years we have seen a run down of the education system and every public service imaginable. It induces apathy, to the point where people are far too happy just to sit back and let it happen. And what we're saying is: fuck it. No. Let's get to it!" Taking power means taking up and developing the methodology of direct action. According to the leaflet also quoted above, direct action: "enables people to develop a new sense of self-confidence and an awareness of their individual and collective power; is founded on the idea that people can develop the ability for self rule only through practice, and proposes that all persons directly decide the important issues facing them; is not just a tactic, it is individuals asserting their ability to control their own lives and to participate in social life without the need for mediation or control by bureaurats and professional politicians; encompasses a whole range of activities, >from organising co-ops to engaging in resistance to authority; places moral commitment above positive law; is not a last resort when other methods have failed, but the preferred way of doing things." It would be interesting in another context to apply a longer analysis to these assertions. In other cases, the adoption of direct action tactics within an over-all hierarchical structure by profoundly conservative organisations is an increasing part of the political landscape. The week before the M41 occupation saw, in Northern Ireland, a large confrontation between the ultra-reactionary loyalist Orangemen and the police. Operation Rescue in the States could be counted as another instance in which moral commitment is placed above positive law, but again to repressive ends. In addition, the almost kinaesthetic will to pure action that can occur in activist cultures can for many reasons become a preferred way of doing things. But it is essential to guard against when it works to the preclusion of thought and discussion, or to negate the development of self-confidence and ability to act in others. Though they can't be said to form any kind of constitution, what is important though in this series of statements on direct action is in the way that they intermesh and reformulate each other as different interests and dynamics are played out through them. What is most essential about it is that conflicts that are too often hidden in society are able to be acted out or acted upon in a public and inclusive manner. As Marcia points out, "We're just kind of empowering and showing by example really. You show by example that you can challenge existing set-ups and state set-ups and so-on" Dealing with social antagonisms through direct action brings with it such a jolt of raw immediate power that it can often be suprising. She continues: "One event was in Greenwich, and that was organised after the Islington street party. That took two days to organise We just sat there on Tuesday said, right, what are we going to do to follow on from the street party and do something major in London. A couple of people went off, decided on the location and then we had, what, fifty to one hundred people turned up and then we blocked off the road. It was a simple as that. It's so easy. Once you know that you can do it and that you feel you have a right to do it - I think this is a problem people have - it's feeling that they have the right to impact that deeply, you know, on society. Like closing off a road and pissing off loads of drivers. It's quite a strange thing to feel that you're able to do, because you just wouldn't usually do that and a lot of people are quite scared."
That jolt of power is recognisable in other ways. Reclaim The Streets have recently had the accolade of having their office raided and records copied by the police. Police can also often be found tailing people leaving the premises, sometimes in large intimidating groups. This close attention from the cops brings with it some problems for techniques of organisation. How is it possible to have an organisation that is at once open and welcoming, yet which at the same time is involved in actions that come close to the edge of the law or which explicitly break it? It is particularly in this sense that questions of structure, trust and the sharing of information or tasks become important: Marcia: "We have an open meeting every week. We invite anyone along. We don't have any leaders as such. I mean there's obviously going to be those who have a lot more time to give to Reclaim The Streets, but in essence we're an umbrella and within us we've got everyone from animal rights activists to the Lesbian Avengers." Mark: "It's an environmental networking group really because we've got people from all direct action movements and indeed non direct action movements, even Friends of The Earth god bless 'em." Marcia: "The meeting is very much an open forum. People suggest what they want to see happen and then we try and facilitate these ideas." Like many contemporary political groups Reclaim The Streets are more a collection of techniques of operation and a series of points of potential intersection than a specific definable organisation. As Marcia says, "It's more of an anarchic disorganisation." In this sense the type of organisation helps them dodge the single-issue trap of narrowing down and becoming more safe. They need to avoid this in order to deal with the situation effectively but which is ever present as an option, particularly for environmentally focused groups, in that it might for instance bring in more passive support and finances. Here the model of openness and the application of the direct action principles the outline above in fact helps bydestabilising their own situation so that it is always something that itself requires direct action and change. (Essential too if the network is not to peak and degenerate into a mess of fractured and bickering - or just plain bored, cliques). This ad hoc network structure makes the surveillance undertaken by the police a lot harder. When a demonstration or an action is decided upon, and the various issues of what is important to tackle are thrashed out, separate work groups will be allocated to decide on the location and tactics. This group will then report back to the main meeting with the location to meet and what equipment to bring such as, bicycles, round-blocking scaffolding tripods and so on. This mixture of openness, mixed with a pragmatic tactical secrecy has worked well so far. The Reclaim The Streets network and others like it have managed to exert a significant political force for collections of people who would individually be so powerless. And, unlike say, politicians, knowing that it is shameful to speak for others, they do not claim to represent anyone but themselves, instead, encouraging or provoking them, even those they are in conflict with, to do the same. Mark: "We're really on new ground now, and because we don't have any leaders there's a lot of talking going on, a lot of thought as to where we are and who we are. Which is good, which is positive for the whole direct action movement."
As the party-goers finally left the occupation of the M41 way past midnight, around a thousand people escorting the sound systems away >from the police en masse, a strange sight was to be seen in the middle of the motorway. Underneath the giant skirt hoops of the drag queens. Under the cover of the music. Some people had drilled two holes through the surface of the road and planted a young tree in each.
J18 Vs G8 Human Throwdown
The crowd is the thing. You start with a meeting point and a time. There's a another meeting going on. The G8 in Cologne. That sets the time. June 18th. The bankers and politicians have had long enough. A series of meetings; the Encuentros for Humanity and Against Neo-Liberalism called by the Zapatistas in Chiapas and in Spain; the meeting of activists from India, Europe, East Asia a few different Americas and enough other places that happened in Switzerland last year build up the way things can get going. The slogan goes "Our Resistance Must be as Global As Capital", it's a web site (www.bak.spc.org/j18), its a poster, paper newsletter (also at www.schnews.org.uk), cheap stickers, a line of graffiti, new lines of alliance to be invented. Enough groups round the world trying out new ways of trying it on. Setting up marches is the old way of doing things. Everything in straight lines. Fact is the political slouch through the city is just too slow for nowadays. The shape people want to throw on the streets is a different one. The way that this gets done is by setting up things simple, but keeping it open. Name a time and a place, get the news moving through any media system going. This is the way the crowd works in information. Keep it spread and feed one into the other. Something slick. Something scrappy, whatever. The web site feeds news of what's going down in forty other countries on the same day. The URL (www.j18.org) is on the sticker, on the newsletter. Whatever arrives gets pumped out on a cheap FM transmitter stuck top an office block. At the same time though, there's a thousand mouths shut when it comes to talking to the press. In a few months they'll be printing photos of rioters. Offering a reward to grasses. A bit of public service on the side. The way the crowd moves on the streets is a mix. In the eighties there was a short series of demonstrations in the same place called Stop The City. Time of anarcho-punk. (Check AK Press's excellent 'Shibboleth, my revolting life' a new book by Penny Rimbaud ofCrass for more). Full on rage fuelled by immanent nukes and a triumphalist Thatcher spilled out into a choreography of glued-up locks, smashed bank windows, trashed McDonalds, the chant machine gone mobile, it was tasty so they say. This time, things got more variety. Besides, for most governments in Europe we've got a generation of ex-social-democrat ex-hippies bent on humanitarian war. Punk routines just can't express the disgust fully enough. An open format demands that people have the chance to invent what they are going to do. The Critical Mass device works well in London. Get a bunch of cyclists together, pedal round the city nice and slow. Instant rolling bottleneck. The streets are so dense here it doesn't take much to change the pace of the whole area. The ability to shift speeds is important. Get a water mains outlet. Knock it open. Block the drains to the forty foot fountain. Instant paddling pool. No business as usual on that street. Aerosols, stickers, a hand covered in green poster paint from a bucket quickly leaves a trail of day-glo gack. Some of the banks get occupied. Part of the two million quid damage, so the Financial Times says the day after, is caused by the expense of clearing up the stench of urine. This is an area where not even the two kids that we came along with can, like granny says, spend a penny outside of some sheet-glass compound. These streets we're in have been a financial trading area since before the Templars brought the number zero, a conceptual technology that opened up banking, back from the Crusades. The streets are still patterned in many ways from Medieval times. It suits the way we move. Alleys, multibranched crossroads and plenty of threads from here to there. From the initial meeting point of thousands people split up. Make for wherever. There's targets to choose from. The bank of England. The Futures Exchange - which had a trading floor disrupted. Every major financial institution has a branch here. People move. It's Casual Friday. Time for a saunter. Chinos and Rlph Lauren shirts? Nope. A few blokes are dressed up in grotty suits and seriously non-business shoes. Hmmm, smells like subterfuge. There's smoke flares in their tatty briefcases though. So it spills out. Some crossroads it's just a simple sit down. Block the traffic. Hand out leaflets. (There's thousand of these sloganised bright white and orange micro-flyers, say five by ten millimetres thrown everywhere. Politicise the street-sweeping trucks or something). Keep the traffic turning back. Beer and fags. Stop the couriers shifting them important documents. Have a dance to the pedal powered sound system. When the cops turn up, move off slowly. Go somewhere else. Or throw your arms and legs against their body armour, batons and shields. Other places it's jammed. Someone's got some way of making music. A Samba band. The people are so thick together the whole block is immobilised. Thousand of copies of a parody of the London Evening standard are given out to passers-by. The sparrow is an endangered species and George Soros knows a thing or two it says here. Underneath the rhizome, concrete. The cowd is an intelligent crowd. What that means is that everyone's on the look out for what goes down next. The little clusters of body-movements or shouts that means a change in movement. Take care of the people around you. Never panic. Think of the next move. Keep an eye on whether streets are being closed off. Check for new ways of moving, new targets. The way the cops move has to be understood too. They're some clumsy dancing partner. Limited to ten metre charges by their command structure and the weight of the riot gear you just have to stay nimble and calm. The other way the cop machine moves is more serious though. Broken bones are nothing compared to getting locked into a court system tooled up more and more over the last twenty years to break the heart of ravers, travellers, strikers and protesters. The City of London is the most heavily surveilled area in Europe. Some ways of evading the cameras have to be found. here's hundreds of masks distributed in different colours. 'On the signal', it says printed on the back, 'follow the colour of mask that you've got'. There is no signal. But they stay on peoples' faces. At least till the summer heat gets going. For now the best way round is to shin up the poles that some of the cameras are on top of and wrap a carrier bag round the thing. Whilst you're doing this of course the police, or the journalists they can later seize the snaps off of, will be photographing. (The court just blocked their automatic right to do this). A load of people'll likely get the knock one morning a couple of months down the line. (Forty-three arrested by the end of July). The ten thousand or so in the Carnival create the noise in the database for those who do get pulled - and need to maintain that support months later when they go to trial. Privacy, like public space, only works for those high up enough behind the plate glass windows. The way the street's been turned over to the security forces is something thought over by the Critical Art Ensemble in their book 'The Electronic Disturbance' suggesting politicised hacking as a way of putting economic pressure on corporations in order to achieve specific aims. Nothing of the sort was made public - and why would it - during June 18th, but this suggests one way to play things when the street has become a recording device. At the same time, the shapes thrown by the crowd are just as much to do with making slow, peaceful use of the streets as with direct conflict. Maybe it's the crumbs of Ecstasy in the bloodstream. Maybe it's going for something other than the too fetished riot - a direct, open and public working out of what life can be like if you stir things up a bit. This can look like aimlessness, but from above, from the helicopter, what this looks like is say three or four large clumps of people each spread out over key intersections. The space emptied of traffic, effectively controlled by this is large. In between are people moving around acoss each group. When the police come, and they come relatively slowly, once they've taken the time to work out where people are, what they do is to contain the situation. Either keep people moving - which sometimes suits us fine - or to contain things. Then they amp it up until there's a fight and they can get the footage in and justify the overtime. When people attack the police they have to learn that it's not to be done just to stay static. Once they've got a crowd blocked in - as happened at the foot of Southwark Bridge the tables are turned. They will always be slower when responding to the crowd's initiative - take it. In the meantime, someone's sprayed 'Cops Suck Arse' on the front of one of their cars. The streets of London are so clean nowadays, so free of the unauthorised, the unpermitted, the unpaid-for. Something like this just makes you smile, teeth and all.
CRIMINAL MINDED
cruising
the metro on premium petrol
At a school, pretty much all of the kids came in one day having watched
the same documentary the night before on telly. They are all twitching
and swearing, all through the day. Whenever they can. The programme was
about a boy with Tourette's syndrome. Images of conditions such as Tourette's
gain an independent existence which often end up providing people with
some interesting techniques. In the middle of a supermarket you could
call a tin of baked beans a cunt.
from
crack-whore to president
Objections to Gangsta rap were often made on the basis of data collected
in 1991 through Soundscan, a computer system which records the demographics
of people buying records in the US. This survey showed that the major
audience for gangsta rap was white suburban middle class males. The survey
showed that white suburban middle class males were also the biggest purchasers
of grunge, dance and metal. The survey did not show that Soundscan computer
systems are mainly installed across middle America, specifically in mainstream
record stores and record stores located in suburban shopping malls.
police
van covered in blood
Criminal mindedness forms itself along the lines of sensibility transfer:
a seam of interlocking perspectives that repel, dither, and co-mingle
as a repository of micro-techniques in realisation. Watching, arranging,
guessing, making gestures. Standing around waiting for something to happen
more often than actually making one thing move to somewhere else. For
the search devices of a multitude of capitalisms and anti-capitalisms,
it forms a grey area of R&D within which to operate. Crime is formulated
as transgression of the law, or of law. In the first case it is defined
by the boundaries and ambitions of a bureaucratic schema; in the second,
produced in the horrific ablation of the just. The schema of the law is
constructed in order that citizens may turn their backs on horror. Understanding
this, De Sade - through verbal violence - turned the compositional technique
of law into a motor of horror. Criminality as sensibility, cannot easily
develop an archive. It cannot found itself on statutes or the centuries
old accretion of judgements. As far as it is systematic, of itself, it
is nervous. It lives in, or within the smell of, horror. When attempts
are made to specify these micro-techniques, and to capture them into a
new counter-schema - as for instance in the case of Steal This Book by
the Yippie Abbie Hoffman where the specifics of shoplifting, scamming,
free circulation were subject to grandiose public definition and thus
sealed up - they cease to operate, or effectively become traps for the
unwary.
stitched-up
Inside a metal and plate glass display cabinet on a wall in Waterloo rail
station: deluxe luggage tag; pocket torch; worldwide travel plug; travel
clock; mini combination padlock; mini key padlock; 'Body Bank' de-luxe
neck wallet organiser (female model); 'The Insider' pick pocket-proof
travel pouch attached by loops to belt and folded inside trousers (male
model); 'Inflater' travel cushion; 'Snoozer' yoke style inflatable cushion;
'Fold-a-flight', foldaway shoulder bag; mini umbrella; 'Fold-a-case' foldaway
overnight case. Here, on display at last, are the devices with which to
gain the security of self and property; to ensure the wise traveller's
bodily comfort and connection to the grids of power and time. Gadgets
attempt to induce a relationship of transcendence, and in the form of
this display case, pose a question. What combination, number or variety
of these devices is optimal: would provide the traveller with unperturbed
movement in any context; or would enable the savouring of the maximum
of divergent or perplexing sensations whilst maintaining the requisite
happy cohesion?
quick-cuffs, pager, mag-lite, handcuffs, baton, walkie-talkie The best
way to involve someone in a fraud is to initiate them by what they consider
to be a minor illegality. Shopping Strategies: End of Season League Positions
1. conspicuous non-consumption as badge of moral superiority 2. looking
good in the face of capital 3. bootleg acessorisation 4. false consciousness
5. wilful semiotic contamination as act of solidarity
Portable
Stoppages
A CID cop, buying his clothes in BHS. Anything will do. He may be seen
attentively to assume soft, sporty, casual attire. His purchases are strictly
neutral. They must be made. The humanity outside never stops begging for
his marks of attention. Movement on the street and amongst the clothes
racks wheedles for the one safe and understandable response from him.
He must obtain these clothes in order to pass amongst them; to countervail
the tumult of responses that their bodies will press against him. He must
liquidate their authority over his senses. Even peripheral involvement
with these human suckholes is of the most draining horror in their demand
for the humiliation and punishment that only he is able to bring down
upon them. As he runs his fingers into the pockets of a navy blouson jacket,
checking the size of the pockets, he remembers his Father reading out
loud to the family. "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness,
this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity." Out of the corner of his eye he sees the studious
upturned faces of the other children pressing up against the edges of
the table. Mother impassive at the other end from the reader gestures
his eyes back to him. "One ever feels his twoness - an American and a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognised strivings; two warring
ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being
torn asunder." The reverie leaves him. Working with his hands hidden inside
the racks of other jackets he bunches one up, and turning away from the
camera tucks it under his left arm where it is concealed by the folds
of his coat. He walks out of the store.
no drugs,
no hats, no trainers
Where the rich use accountants, the rest of us make use of personalities.
"Protective alienation of the real person from the performing individual."
A chameleon skin is worn. It is tailored not of photographic film, to
bring pictures to please the master back >from the darkness, but of mirrors.
The mirrors are bent. They throw back everything just as it should be.
Keeping
it real
On 15th October 1997 four men were sent down for up to eight years. The
first to be caught via a nationwide use of the National Criminal DNA Register,
they were convicted of stealing and selling RAM chips. As part of the
historical shift of agency towards the specifically traceable genes and
electrons they were trading in the commodity that allowed their capture.
Large scale gene isolation, mapping and recording was only made possible
by the advent of computers.
Customs
The sole inhabitant of this world is a logic machine. The machine consists
of two parts: a finite set of operating rules, built somehow into the
works and unchangeable during operation, and a tape of unlimited length,
upon which changeable information can be stored. The tape is divided up
into cells. They may each contain only one symbol. There is a marker to
dictate which cell is being inspected at any given moment. The tape holds
the information that the machine is to process. The machine knows no compunction,
no remorse, no guilt. It stutters signs of equivocation only when nothing
is running through it; when nothing is happening. Events piling up of
their own accord. There is something insane about the momentum with which
the marker slides now back and now down. The machine is sequential: it
operates by activating one rule at a time, performing the actions prescribed
by that rule, and then activating another. What had taken ages to build
was demolished at a touch. Everything crumbled in the twinkling of an
eye, rewritten. If the machine chooses to write any output it must do
so somewhere on the same tape. It may write over input information. The
number of cells growing is without limit. Before and after each operation
the machine enters a state. The machine only knows two things: its current
state and the current cell pointed to. This is all it needs. When it gets
into a state the current cell begins to grow. It forms another - anywhere
along the tape. Thick white flesh string of knots. Covered in a sheath
of mucus. Never exposed to sunlight. It just grows, just records, devours
time. Coils piling up. Kills time. Operation after operation. Kills thought.
Growth upon growth.
in-car
ocean
Two men from a large organisation are assigned to transport an object
from one section to another. The journey is hundreds of miles. They use
a special white transit van normally used to transport prisoners. Moving
this thing is a secret. It is obvious that the object is some sort of
security risk and that completing the task will stretch their capabilities
to their limits. One of the men is older, disciplinarian, intolerant.
The other is younger, involved in misappropriation of the organisation's
resources. He is shortly to leave and start up a new life. He will sit
on top of a bank account made up of secret shavings from thousands of
the organisation's transactions. Smiling into an overdraft. This thing
that he was forced to do mustn't get in the way of his plans. Throughout
the journey it is unclear quite what the object is. At one time it breaks
loose from the van and they panic, but it is recaptured. It appears seductive,
profitable, homicidal. The men are not sure how to deal with the situation.
They drive through the edges of the city, the suburbs. At a petrol station
they stop and fill up. At the petrol station an incident occurs which
nearly compromises - which means to destroy but politely - the security
of the operation. Because there are two men and only one object they are
able to outnumber it and catch it by pretending to be two different people.
By working together in their different ways to catch the object the men
are able to change their understanding of each other. The object seems
to be organic. During one of the stops one or the other of the men attempts
to discover what it is. The documentation that they carry only attends
to who is responsible for every aspect of the security and care of the
object at any given moment. At the moment they are responsible. They have
hundreds of miles to travel before passing it over to the next organisation.
One of the men feels around the object with his fingers. It is full of
holes. During one stop the other man is asleep. He, the younger man, takes
theobject out of its secure holding to investigate further. He even puts
his penis inside it. He is clearly insane. This is done in secret. This
act compromises the ability of the vehicle to go in a straight line. They
crash miles from anywhere. They are lost from the over-view of the schedule
and the organisation. To make matters worse the young man, his behaviour,
becomes more and more contaminated by the object. They are now between
the organisation that sent them and the one they are going towards. The
young man's reason has gone, he has become sicker and sicker. He is unable
to make a judgement. The older man knows the best way he can help him
is by becoming hard and making the power of horror overcome the temporary
weakness of his body. He is brutal and skilled in the application of small
terrors. This situation makes the younger man's head seize up. He can
do nothing except keep trying to snatch glances, trying to understand
what it is. His is filled with a liquid terror that seems to hammer in
side him and come out of his skin like some evaporation. This is something
he doesn't want the older man to know about. At one stop, he gets out
of the van and puts his head up against a wall and pukes. He does not
register to the object. He knows he will never be at its level until he
destroys himself completely. The older man doesn't believe that this is
happening. They fight. The younger man is being digested by the object,
from touching it. When they fight this helps him. When they finish and
he has won the fight he feels sad because he knows he is now completely
outside of the organisation that the older man is inside. He is outside
the law but in outside it in a way that's more drastic than when he was
inside of it but ripping it off. The older man's shirt is black with dried
blood. He respects the other man now. Because he is outside, the young
man can now speak to the woman. It's obvious, but this is what he has
now found out that the object is, that's the way it occurred. She is intelligent
and strong - shes tried to escape twice - and blonde and beautiful and
pretty so much so that it makes it tedious to contemplate. They are hundreds
of miles from where they started and because of the escape attempts they
are nearly a day late in bringing her to the other organisation. This
other organisation is a separate one inside of a larger organisation which
also contains the one the older man is still inside and which the younger
one has been cut off from. There is no way they can even appear to go
wrong. They take a short cut across some deserted country. It is freezing
cold. The van breaks down. They wander across the frozen moor to look
for some help. They are lost, then they fall down an abandoned mine-shaft.
They see death. They know they are going to starve or freeze or fall to
death as they are unable to climb out of the hole. In the hole is complete
and utter blackness. The rocks are softly shaped from running water and
the years of the mine workings. Despite the fact that they are taking
her to be consumed by the other organisation which they understand to
mean her death, after a long time in the mine the two men see that the
woman has gone and found some rope which she lowers down into the mine
shaft. They had not noticed that she had not fallen into the hole. This
means they still have something to learn so that the story can go on.
The rope is brand new and very expensive looking. This means that the
film maker still has something to learn. They climb up the rope. Because
the woman saved them when they didn't expect her too, or didn't even notice
that she could the two men are now joined with her in another kind of
organisation. A counter-memory of owed favours, shared bullshit and intimidation.
It also mean that the younger man and the woman love each other without
saying it but fucking. This new organisation is different. Being part
of it means that the two men have to help the woman escape the other organisation
which is part of the larger organisation that the organisation which owns
them is part of andthat they now also have to escape from. gimme some
raw data Application forms, like history, are written by the victors.
The difference between a B1 and a form applying for a grant from the Arts
Council is that whilst the former just requires straight points of fact
to be supplied with whatever degree of veracity, the latter requires more
subservience, more socialisation, from the applicant. When shall we see
the day when requests for unemployment benefit are made under such romantic
headings as: 'proposal'? freephone the cops Police live the form-filling
and waiting life of doleys improved only by a license to spastic bursts
of occasional violence, a diet of Tagamet and the ready availability of
enough over-time to ignore whatever they need to ignore. There's a book
called Death Scenes published by Feral House in the States. Most of their
books are to do with showing how much death they can stomach. This book
is different though because it is quite openly a topology of a cop's mind.
A testament that because it is pulled documentarily out of a third person
doesn't get quite so trapped into being simply transgressive. That of
course, would be up to the reader. DEATH SCENES is a facsimile of a photo-album
collected and put-together by Jack Huddleston, a Californian cop working
between the Twenties and Fifties. The collection is prefaced by a brief
signed introduction. The intent is apparently purely didactic. "To show
the story of the peace officer and his problems." That just as surely
as cops form the only wall holding back a tidal wave of unrelenting criminal
chaos, that 'Crime does not pay' - either that or a thin masking device
for a private selection of the choicest cuts. Either way, Deathscenes
is a form of moral database, a leaky property cupboard damning the viewer
with culpability for membership in an insane species: Scene of Crime photographs,
the contents of morgue drawers, accidents, suicides, murders, explosions,
fires, carbon monoxide poisoning, bodies thrown amongst blood-spattered
trinkets, tatty curtains, landlord furniture, a guy who drowned sleeping
in the bath, mug shots of prostitutes, petty criminals, lesbians, safe
blowers, dealersÉ This archive to be viewed through eye-shaped stab-wounds
produces a diagrammatic stations of the cross for a religion based on
the repeated dumb epiphany of the fragile surface tension of skin and
the exquisite facility of control. As the victims, details and freaks
pile up in its pages, two thresholds are achieved. The first is the 'distance'
that a professional must hold from the orror within which he works. The
second is something that oozes into existence the more that is encompassed
within its pages. In the city, tens of thousands of variables are acting
on each other. At a certain threshold of interrelation the results of
certain behaviours end up glued into this book. The data it incorporates
goes in torrents of overflow, past the minimal array of sets applied to
them. The cop can't handle it, so into his personalised circle of hell
he pulls in photographs of victims of illnesses labelled hydrophobia,
leprosy and elephantiasis; of the genitals of a hermaphrodite wrenched
open for the camera by thick rubber gloved hands a guy covered in 'lewd'
tattoos; on facing pages, photos of a shrunken head, and of a strangled
cat with one head and two bodies. In and between the collapsing pages,
connective vectors are formed: the reflection of certain textures of light;
glassiness thrown from a screaming eye and a broken plate; the moistness
of sets of wounds as a factor of a relational category of morbidity mapped
onto the celerity or stupidity of death; black patches under chairs, in
corners of rooms, spilling out >from a head torn off by a shot-gun blast.
Things that mean nothing begin, by the sole virtue of a ruthless proximity,
to eke out a generative texture of horror.
double
memory campaign
Lying nonchalant, stretched out on the floor, shoulders propped onto the
wall, one hand loose in an impact shrug. Legs crossed, absent mindedly
showing a length of white almost hairless calf and the clean undersides
of his shoes. The left side of his head, it has crumbled into a mass of
jelly. A greased back widow's peak gone all awry on top. Thick blood streams
out of both nostrils following the creases in his relaxed face down over
his chin to turn his white shirt black. Face, the remaining side, the
animation of the muscles gone. Face so pale and heavy you wouldn't ever
have see it that way in sleep. A shapeless mess on the other. Nothing
else to be said. He's about forty-so and is recently emptied. He's holding
up a small card to his right eye. It's some promotional thing. 'This is
the program: one: eat, drink and look sharp two: fuck as much as you can
three: get as much dope as you want without working for the money to buy
it with In order to achieve these ends we have to construct an assault
on existence in a system that attempts to construct everything in terms
of an answer to the following questions: do you want flowers? would you
like a new haircut? are you looking for a gift? do you require stationary?
are you looking for clothes? fruit and vegetables? books? records? health
and fitness facilities? health and fitness supplies? do you need a lawyer?
where can I book my holiday? get my hair styled? where are the games centres?
The voice
when it comes is slow.
Around him, a collapsed stack of aerosol starch. Some splayed over like
accidental petals and some finished rolling, a couple of metres away maybe,
from where he fell. The voice, locking into place: "I have on a black
and white," The jaw flapping up and down, not mechanically but like something
getting knocked about in the wind, as the crushed side of his head starts
to glisten with fresh juice, "ÉCheckerboard Versace chain. I have some
Versace sandals that have the gold heads all around the ankles. I have
on Versace spandex, a Versace top and a Versace beltÉ" He pauses. Everything
shuts up. "Everything matches." The immobile bulk of the figure starts
to itch into movement again. "It's part of my image and I love nice things;
I love nice clothing. I'm always gonna shop top-notch. This latest look,
it helps me like a healing medication. You're dead. You're happy. It makes
you look like you've got no worries in the world. I like it. Death? The
dead are innocent. It makes me happy. People may ask what lounge of stupidity,
what gaming table of depravity has this foul carcass minced its way out
from? They don't know. They're jealous. It's simple. I'm buffed, waxed
and detailed and they look like shit." "Now you take a look at that one
over there, quite classy. Almost. She's so cadaverous that when a fart
occurs within - such velocity is reached that it takes two full minutes
for her buttocks to clap back together again. It's nice, but the clothes....
" Skin covered in greasy cling film layers and gaffer tape, ten layers
thick, scuffed and leaking. "Cheap." You're like that? "How do I keep
my gaping wounds so fresh looking and juicy without resorting to such
things? Easy. I have cells secreting mucus by exocytosis - no that's not
a label, it's a biological process... They are built into my wounds. They
are constantly refreshed and moist at all times. Thousands of these cellular
factories are embedded into my skull to produce as much glycoprotein as
I need to express my real me to the outside world in a safe and hygienic
manner."
ecout?
et repet?
There is a class of visualisation devices that are constructed of perceptual
mechanisms whose perspectival instructions permit viewing only by the
most perfected of subjects. Virtual worlds locked into the conventions
of Renaissance sight machines, singular vanishing points, parallel lines
disappearing towards a maths-induced horizon; golfing worlds with perimeter
fence on perpetual repeat; anti-radar missiles that are blind without
being captured in the signal of the anti-aircraft station they are fired
to destroy; paintings whose double contents only reveal themselves once
the correct lense has been placed over them; stereographs inducing eyes
to drift out of one and into another kind of focus; They manufacture their
own viewer in the act of being seen. Users of interactive art installations
know this and are thus always trying to find ways in which take make themselves
the perfect recipient of the art, or at least to not spend too much time
trying to interact with the dumb or perhaps broken parts of the set-up
when they know they have a whole show full of such conundrums ahead of
them. Thus, the acute visitor to a show of electronic art first makes
sure that before anything else they know where the video camera, the motion
sensor, the pressure pad, the infra-red beam expects them to be. This
is the only crucial part of the work. toilet stalls, voting booths, telling
counters, betting booths, language lab An unfilled form is a desiring
machine hungering for completion. If a random selection of Lambeth Council's
finest examples were buried in a timecapsule to be opened in a thousand
year's time they would be sufficiently powerful to wipe out any future
perfect civilisation. Forms are the key component in dysfunctional bureaucracy.
Forms are printed on paper and designed to be read by a computer in one
or more of three ways: - mechanically scanned using character-spacing
forms and optical character recognition, the requisite yesses or noes
stripped out of it in a procedure culminating in another negative or positive.
- rather than letting the client directly at the machine which adjudicates
the way in which the form has been filled the information is entered by
an employee into the database. This employee may or may not have to interface
with the client. - Schedules of form filling are designed for employees.
Records that the correct forms have been filled, that specified tests
have been carried out at the correct time are filled in a second level
reading of an employees' records. Recording the fulfilments of minimal
responsibility becomes the process by which a job is kept for an individual,
the process by which a contract is kept by a sub-contracting organisation,
the way accusations of negligence can be disproven. It is the record that
something was done - even if only an act of form-filling. Forms are designed
to receive the information that they are designed to receive and to create
an unmistakable alert when this need is not met. In this way, they automate
the process of protective alienation but in doing so they abnegate 'care'.
This can work in two ways. In the context of performing a benefits application
where all that is required by the 'client' is for the money to be extracted
from the state for as long as is possible and by the person processing
the client for the form to be filled in with as little disruption to the
smooth prcessing of the claim as possible. Things go wrong in this case
when either of them has an undue regard for finding out the actual context
of the form filling. The impact of computation is not to make the situation
any more - or even potentially more - efficient, but just to make it faster
to process. Protective alienation via forms is also used for instance
in the Health Service where a patient will be summonsed to an appointment
only to find out that their physical presence is solely required as a
corroboration of the act of filling out the form by the health service
employee. Any actual concern beyond the schedule-determined well-being
of the patient is solely at the operative's discretion and must not interfere
with their ability to discharge their duties within the required time.
Forms are essentially a digital medium transferred into analogue form.
They are based on yes/no switches. Things start to go wrong - and traps
are laid to catch the unwary - in the sections where situations and reasons
have to be described. It is in these sections that life among forms becomes
a performative act and protective alienation of the real self from the
performing individual becomes an essential skill. The key aspect of the
existence of forms in and between series of binary and analogue operations-
that they are on paper - is also one of their key advantages with regard
to dysfunctional bureaucracy. Data stored on computer is always very easy
to back up. The costs of duplicating and storing paper records is extremely
high. Storing records on paper means that loosing an individual document
or file is far more effectively, convincingly and even 'naturally' done.
Elimination of Vice and Propagation of Virtue Squad One kind of political demonstration goes like this. The marchers assemble. They mill around until the organisers move things on. The march is accompanied by a light police presence. There is a van at the front videoing the front of the march. There is a helicopter above the march, filming it and feeding information to vans of reinforcements in side streets. There are a few police accompanying the march on foot and on motorbike. As the march progresses through the streets, key junctions are blocked off by police vehicles. At the turning points there is a special operations officer with four officers surrounding him taking photographs. His camera has a large metal shield. He is also a member of the camcorder revolution and has one ready. At the moment though he just picks off photographs of known activists and those with scarves or other clothes that could later become masks. If these turning points are at a crucial junction, for instance at a road leading to a right-wing headquarters, genetic engineering laboratory, factory gates, government building there will be cameras hidden and visible recording the march. They will be on roofs or behind lace curtains (the depth of field set to go beyond the net). If the police choose, they can attack the march at this point and use the substantial amount of documentary evidence gathered by their action to send people to prison. As the march progresses towards its end, the number of police accompanying it increases. The march will pass by a government ministry and the gated road to the home of the prime minister. Luckily, the police have already mounted a large, remotely operable TV-quality camera on an immense bright yellow crane and also stationed a number of mounted officers nearby. As the march passes by they chant more loudly and toss a few placards over the gates. Some of the march stands still. Some flags are torn down from official buildings and a window is broken. Anarchy symbols are sprayed very neatly on varios government buildings and monuments. During this time, the crane mounted camera, moves about three to four metres above the heads of the crowd, recording everyone. As the crowd run out of ideas, the police horses charge into the crowd. People in the crowd fight back with fists, bunched up newspapers, empty drinks cans and more placards. At this point some of the crowd pull scarves over their mouths and noses. The bright yellow camera moves overhead, changing its position as the action moves. Apparently no-one sees it. No attempts are made to attack it. Minimal amounts of arrests are made during this skirmish. That will come much later. Two lines of police move in support of the mounted officers. After drawing two lines across the road, they separate the marchers into two sections. The end section of the march denied entry to the square is largely made up of people with children. The two sections of the march are gradually pushed away from each other. In the square the majority of the marchers have arrived. There are police lines across every road into the square. people are allowed to leave, but not to enter. There is music to dance to and some sort of rally over a bad PA. Police photographers with their minders wander through the crowd taking records of people. Anyone doing any technical work, people tying banners to lamp-posts, anyone moving anything. No one attacks them. No one attempts to get in their way or the way of the lense. No one follows the video camera with a car battery and electro-magnet, wiping the tape. No one wears a mask or any kind of disguise. The camera is allowed to operate freely.
let me
put my axxe up your cxxt
Security guards in shops always have names. The ones in uniform have names
so that they can identify themselves. It's on the plastic badge. The plain-clothes
guards, detectives, use their names in a different way. A shoplifter just
walked out of a shop with something under his coat. A man walks up and
says, "Excuse me sir, my name is Paul McCartney". The thief's mind gags.
It goes: uh... that wanker? He stands still. He doesn't also notice that
the man is also saying, "I'm a detective for blahblah. Could you please
accompany me back into the store." By this time, it's too late to run.
1 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks, Signet Classics, Harmondsworth 1985, p.45 2 Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, Faber and Faber, London 1993, p.196 3 Death Scenes, a homicide detective's scrapbook, edited by Sean Tejaratchi, with an introduction by Katherine Dunn, Feral House, Portland 1996
