Down With The Working-Class! Long Live World Revolution!
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'If détournement* were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting: détournement on this level would really spice it up.'
-- Gil Wolman and Guy Debord
The end of work means the end of workers.
What are the possibilities of 3D printers in the social revolution? How might permafacture destroy the battle between the sexes? When open-source hardware does away with its proprietary adversary and in so doing obliterates the role of progress in human domination, who will benefit, and who will do it: in other words what sort of person will make, and what sort of person will be made by, world revolution? As, over time, such people put an end to all governments and all dictatorships made by them, extinguish all wars and all the armies who make them, liquidate all masters and all the slaves who make them, all prisons and all the criminals made by them, all money and all the poverty made by it; as such people are born together with infant anarchy, what might be some of the most interesting problems we can foresee?
How many changes in everyday life might take place after all work and all bosses see their last days? How might food and eating be transformed by terraforming, no-work farming, food-forests, aquaponics, vertical gardens, wild-fermentation fever (probiotic cultivation), foraging, the world-wide-web, molecular gastronomy? How might productive & unproductive play transform labour? How might poetry spoken in the language of the concrete transform culture? How might permanent revolution in the mode of production & reproduction transform the human spirit? How might reversal of 'the dwindling force of cognition under bourgeois society' transform science & philosophy?
How many changes in everyday life might take place after all work and all bosses see their last days? How might food and eating be transformed by terraforming, no-work farming, food-forests, aquaponics, vertical gardens, wild-fermentation fever (probiotic cultivation), foraging, the world-wide-web, molecular gastronomy? How might productive & unproductive play transform labour? How might poetry spoken in the language of the concrete transform culture? How might permanent revolution in the mode of production & reproduction transform the human spirit? How might reversal of 'the dwindling force of cognition under bourgeois society' transform science & philosophy?
Love Letters hereby encourages all imaginitive attempts by each and everyone to pose and answer all these questions (as well as invent new ones) by any means desirable, and offers to publicise them through this website, as well as any other relevant media.
PLEASE DON'T GIVE US THE SAME THING ALL THE TIME! Contributors must try to know what everybody else has already said, so they can see if what they have to say is actually new. The urge to make all things new needs to be expressed in new ways, and that is the purpose of this section of our project. Contributions should keep that in mind, and make an effort to offer something fresh. Anything worth saying will have to invent a language able to give it a living body: it is the right word that is most likely to be made flesh. Contrariwise, it is the stale repetition that is most likely to come out a thin platitude. What we want is vigorous content whose cutting edge is unblunted by a dull form. This space is reserved for thunderbolts whose explosive substance is delivered in an equally explosive package. It's entirely counter-productive to wield the subversive scalpel when its blade has been blunted!
Contributions can contact siddiq [at) loveletters (dot] za *dot* org
All contributions will be considered. A selection will be published bellow. Selections may appear in modified form -- alongside commentary for example. Original illustrations are encouraged; new illustrations may be interspersed throughout. As of 18 June 2014 this column is composed of the following list of discontents:
Faridabad Majdoor Samachar - In March 2016
Samontaf - Jean-Luc Hitchcock’s Latest Astonishing Venture! (1975-2013)
Ivan Chtcheglov & Siddiq Khan - New Formulary For A Unitary Urbanism (1953 - 2014)
YOU - What Will It Be? (When?)
* Detournment is a creative action in which 'Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations.' In A User's Guide to Detournment, quoted here, the authors concluded:
'Finally, when we have got to the stage of constructing situations — the ultimate goal of all our activity — everyone will be free to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them.
The methods that we have briefly examined here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize.
In itself, the theory of détournement scarcely interests us. But we find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the pre-situationist period of transition. Thus its enrichment, through practice, seems necessary.'
In the 21st century this project (which would today need to be linked explicitly to the new forms of self-organisation developed by the proletariat since then: the two are united as the negative and positive poles of revolutionary creativity, respectively) remains to be renewed.
In itself, the theory of détournement scarcely interests us. But we find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the pre-situationist period of transition. Thus its enrichment, through practice, seems necessary.'
In the 21st century this project (which would today need to be linked explicitly to the new forms of self-organisation developed by the proletariat since then: the two are united as the negative and positive poles of revolutionary creativity, respectively) remains to be renewed.
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“Anti-utopia is unknown territory, from whence no one has ever returned, to this day. And it is this anti-utopia, made possible by the basis of modern society, which must needs fill out the 'inadequacies' of Marx, and which must as well be itself made dialectical, and find its practical uses."
-- Paolo Salvadori, Orientation Debate for the Ex-S.I.
The permanent drift, the permanent strike, the anti-utopia: are all intimately involved in the transcendence of misery whose preliminary steps have always been to make stark and clear the terrible contrast between the present misery of this life and the many possibilities there are for different ways of life.
As the limitations of such steps become apparent through the passage of time, new steps appropriate to new situations become necessary. The exemplary practical lucidity of the subversive avant-garde (whose last historically significant manifestation was the SI) was bounded by its isolation. The exiting tendency towards transcendence of the mass counter-culture (whose last historically significant manifestation were the Children of Soweto) was bounded by its fragmentation – both theoretically, in its failure to forge a critique of the totality, and practically in its sectarian competition, its hierarchical separation, its acceptance and reinforcement of the racial, sexual, political and economic alienation imposed on it by the old world. This is the world we must leave. These are the limitations we must overcome. Those are the boundaries we must breakdown. It is a task put before the struggles of the present by the failures of the past: the ruinous end from which they are constrained to begin: the unfinished business they are obligated to tackle right from the start. As they reinvent the meaning of rebellion for their own time, in their own lives, the revolutionaries of today will have to be, almost immediately, better than all those who went before them, all those who tried their very best and failed. None of them are worthy of emulation, neither those whose names have been recorded in the history books nor the countless masses who quietly shook the foundations of the world but failed to turn it on its head. As for their practice, so for their theories, whose remains are useful today only as an artificial preservative for a rotten way of life; as with all things, these will have to be destroyed in order for the brilliance of the new to be remade from their broken bodies. This section of the website is meant to reemphasise, through concrete examples, the possibility pointed out by DH Lawrence in his introduction to the 1st American edition of his New Poems: 'We can break the neck of habit.'
