vagaries

The Suppresion of savage Customs

send me an email: ddwildblood@hotmail.com

The Suppression of Savage Customs

D.D.Wildblood

Contents

1. Preliminaries
2. Fronts and Supply Lines
3. Surface Continuities of the Political and Social Surface
4. Assume the Image
5. Dimensional Bodies
6. Opening Moves

Epitaph

Notes
Bibliography

 

1. Preliminaries

Overview
The subject matter and issues of this text could generally be described as being about imagery, televisual imagery and the manner in which it has infected and influenced the everyday, the real. However, it should be noted that in writing this text I had no intention of picking topics out of thin air - who does? - but that this text would be a continuation and evolution of my own literary themes, motifs and ideas. What else could it be, but myself, my body verbalized.

>> Leiris suggests that maximum subjectivity is in fact the only means of access to objectivity... << [0]

Extreme subjective statement, is I believe, the best means via which I can provide the reader with all the evidence. Only with an awareness or at least an inkling of the writers prejudices and predilections can the reader have full access to the evidence and to reasons of inclusion and exclusion.
The point is to create an exposition of language / the play of language in word catenation, structure of syntax and metaphor. It is only in the display... >> Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only this witz, this spirituality of language, can justify writing. Not a miserable critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. << [0.1]
So what am I writing about? What are my Objectives? Above I mentioned televisual imagery and although this is an important consideration in my text, it is also an over simplistic summarization of what I wish to discuss. What I wish to discuss is submerged beneath layers of etymological camouflage, it cannot be mentioned, not even whispered faintly - not in this pluralism! And yet...

I make no excuses, so I’ll stop before I begin... I’ll begin...

Proletariat, n. [ < Fr. < L. proletarius, a Roman citizen of the poorest class, who served the state only by having children < proles, offspring ], 1. [Rare], the class of lowest status in any society. 2. the working class; esp., the industrial working class: the current sense.

+

Image, n. [ OFr. < L. imago < imitari, to imitate ], 1. a representation of a person or thing, drawn, painted, etc.; especially, a statue. 2. the visual impression of something produced by a lens, mirror, etc. 3. a copy; counterpart; likeness. 4. a mental picture of something; idea; impression. 5. a type; embodiment: as, he is the image of laziness. 6. a figure of speech, especially a metaphor or simile. v.t. [-aged, -aging], 1. to make a representation of; portray. 2. to reflect; mirror. 3. to picture in the mind; imagine. 4. to typify. 5. to describe graphically or vividly.

=

Screaming glittered compare: >> Ladies and Gentlemen, make way / move over slicky benches / prepare steady grimy mouses / porkers incandescent / nubescent spittle / slimy greasy brittle / shard crushed mutable / sudden video harshity / fading in an interview. <<

All encompassing / symbol and superficial juxtaposition / sterile idents, brandings and colour coded consumption. Every day I intend only to sip - if that - at this chalice, and every day I drown, drift submerged and prone, in a conceptualism / a saturation of verbalized form, which I can as easily defecate, as ocular swallow visual.
Processed waste / pure symbol, or is it a sign. Fragrant morsel dissected with knife and fork / cut / cut into palatable chunks / cud of domestication, masticated. Shit soiled teeth smile for the camera, tongue pressing corporeal clay across backs of molars, pressing pulped saliva striated excreta through incisors. Not a bad taste? Though the surface is upped / washing across the screen / flotsam and jetsam bobbing upon the emetic wash.
The scene closes in upon the body, the persona, its conduct, abilities and attitude, just as the screen closes in upon the retina with its simulation of self / corrected self / compression. There is a scene for each individual and it is to be found in characterizations of the past, retro, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s and so on. A mishmash of the quotational that relies on the proletariat image for reference / that looks to an idealized and managed - over handled - surface of the past for its cues. A spectre haunts the global village, one that would have us assume the mantle of a dimensional body of prole imagery / its political and social surface, a phantasm whose logic is to found in the gulags, the concentration camps and the hills of Hollywood. That human, that imperfect savage must be exterminated, or at least made to feel the need, the need to assume the surface of political and social acceptability, to drown in imposed desires / in an abundance of false desires that assuage the true social and political needs of the individual. >> The more his life is now his product, the more he is separated from his life. << [1]
The scene seen on the screen is one of oneself / compacted, foreshortened, distorted / a parody / compressed site of event and reaction. This compression of scene and screen can be seen in the location of corporate identity / filmic personality / branding: the qualifying tick of Nike / the exclusive dissemination of Hermes - car wrecked burning, Weekend by Jean-Luc Godard / the Red Bull of the Socialist Workers Student Society. The hoarding / a new political and social surface, one made up of the proletariat image has been raised, compounding this emaciated manner of knowing oneself. Obey or be policed by those who obey - carry - the commonality of need and desire as expressed in the surface of proletarian imagery.

Cast a Glance Askantly
Making our way / wading through the flotsam and jetsam, glistened in puke, we find that I use terms such as scene, screen, political and social surface, as well as others within this text. These terms - modes of evocation - are used throughout this work / it would perhaps be as well to give them a limpid quality, I suppose.
As well as their literal / apparent meaning, I have given these terms, these modes, burdens of my own - black ink being no more than a packhorse of the will. Poor old Barthes, didn’t he get trampled by a dictionary full of mules?
Scene: location of event / incident. Locus of mediation and the actable self.
Screen: A surface upon which images are projected / signals received. Facade / surface of simulation and assimilation. The surface of promised appearance.
I also use the term hoarding, which I see as a kind of coverall / an amalgamation of the terms scene and screen.
Proletariat image: The transmitted integument of imagery, the political and social surface that surrounds us, i.e. televisual, photographic and branded. That is, I use the term proletariat to describe the commonality of imagery, not to describe images of the proletariat or a relationship between the working class and imagery.
Dimensional: The prole image given perspective upon the hoarding / made virtual.
Political and Social surface: Hoarding, site of interaction, of expected function.
Spin: Verbalization, the narrative structuring of political and social surfaces.

Immured behind the scene screen’s hoarding - the surface of the political and social - is a dead weight, a pallid cadaver / a post-humanist discard, a savage! This savage, cannot, or perhaps will not be assimilated, absorbed into the image it carries / the conditioning / the proletariat image given spin - velocity and trajectory - by the media carrier. >> ...making the oceans a “vast logistical camp”; that drags behind it a proletariat harnessed to the functioning of the naval vehicle, a proletariat of rowers who are the machine’s true engine, its accelerator in time of battle. << [2]
This incarcerated corpse tapping now at the keys and then upon the hoarding, a necrotic censor of the possibilities and expectations voiced by steadily perfecting mouths, set into cleaned skins, seamless hoardings. Urbane sentiment and axiomatic banalities play upon these hoardings and are seen to be our own, though there is doubt, that wan countenance and its prescient gaze (?) / anachronistic anchor embedded in sedimental rock and silt, weighed upon by a voluminous ocean, distant memory and memory of distance / disturbed / clouds billowing. It is about this anchor that post-modernism gathers, contemplating - struggling to escape - the extermination and fossilization of an ontology / the suppression of human customs.

The proletariat image, workhorse body of the media, bent, transfigured, copied, multiplied, edited, scaled down and down sized, excessive unneeded tissue cut away so as to maximize the effectiveness of its payload. The prole image is lean / a utilitarian image, devoid of the denotative obesity of subject matter (reality?) not so much a representation, as a whole new environment.
The proletarian image produces innumerable offspring - degrading clones - bodies for the battlefield of transmission, [3] reception and reproduction. A battlefield upon which the prole body is subjected to transient chronologies, real time live as it happens via satellite / stock footage, b&w veterans are brought up in support, contextual interlocutors, not so much because of the information carried, but because of the technologically primitive appearance of the footage. Body upon body, twenty five frames a second, given spin, velocity and trajectory at transmission / Slaves.
The proletariat image given spin plays out its potentialities of speed and direction upon the scene screen’s hoarding / a future tense / a sign of what might be [4] restricted only by the metabolic engine beneath the bodywork - ergonomic screen. It could be argued that we give spin to the prole image in terms of editing, set-up, resolution and so forth. However, what I am attempting to express here, and throughout the body of this text is not subjective realization of individual images, but the manner and mass dissemination of a proletarian imagery, which in the light of globalization must necessarily assume a common and banal aspect. With globalization comes a simplification of social and political emotions. This simplification expressed or carried by the body of prole imagery aligns need and desire with what is purchasable / with what the market makes available, rather than with any nebulous need or idiosyncrasy. Individuality is exchanged for a profusion of banal surfaces / pluralism. I am reminded of something Barthes said in Sollers Writer, Athlone Press, 1987: >> We accept types, but not individuals. <<.
Prole images are neither witness to, nor bearers of the truth. Truth is found in the scar tissue, the cut, the edit, discolouration, the congealed footage of the intro blip-vert, [5] where each body / prole image / melds, blurs and mixes with the other. The shattered concrete of the Oklahoma bombing adds a visual texture to the distended stomachs of Africa’s starving. It is in these intros, these blip-verts that we can most clearly see the bodies, the prole image as all it is / stacked / dismembered / strewn, bodies of ecstatic motion and distress, this, this is entertainment.

Toilet paper / I wipe my beshitted - post-evacuated - arse upon the screen. It does not feed the Sudanese starving, but then neither does the camera crew. These venerated images, sacred prole bodies, metastasize, spread and infect / revered and referential, the camera of course never lies. Playing now upon the hoardings, a new skin, an integument given over to the passive reception and display of the prole image, where starvation is exchanged for charity / identity exchanged for the identifiable, the logo, the corporate scar / democracy exchanged for a role of passive reception. MESSAGE RECEIVED!
The Prole image is a political and social surface that covers us all. A surface of the virtual / a filter which excludes the real. Did you see that TV show / read that book / this author? Of course you did that’s currency for the surface. But did you see the play of sunlight upon that wall? The play of the real?

As passive receptors, stimuli junkies, we orbit the locus of transmission and are played upon by the prole image. Public concern, sympathy, consensus / policy formation at the point of impact of prole image upon the scene screen’s hoarding. Of course they starve, die and suffer around the globe, but it is from the sites of transmission, profuse launch points of prole bodies that the degree of resolution is at its highest / carefully rendered and enhanced to then play upon the hoardings.
In exchange we locate charity, concern and the need for something to be done at the site of transmission, launch point of proletariat bodies, (Ethiopia 84, Romania, Sudan) our mercy and then a new resolution of the prole image, that of the happy ending? The historical use and structuring of prole imagery has made its use more conducive to storytelling, to controlled narrative structures, rather than to the incongruities of reality.
The proletariat image cannot ask why [6] it can only give us the results / the traces / the score line, but not the match. A servile teleprinter, faithfully tapping out the full-time scores...
PREM LEEDS UTD 1 LIVERPOOL 1
PREM YORK CITY INDEPENDENCE NOW! MANCHESTER UTD FUCK OFF!
...a self conscious image, the bloodless result.
What of those who set up and select the sites of transmission, will they ask why? [7] Doubtful / they are as inbred, dug-in and servile as the parliamentary civil service of this country.

Thus far I have tended to write of the prole image in terms of news footage, Sudan, Rumania, etc. however, perhaps such footage and the sites selected for emission of prole bodies represent an international front. A front upon which relatively mobile transmitters operate / launch points emitting a prole image syntax / a prescient policy catalyst.
There is also a home front, a domestic scene where the prole image is used to reinforce so-called common values / cultural emblems and preoccupations.
Anyway, let me now deal with these two distinctions of transmission - domestic and international - in a structured, albeit prejudicial manner.

 

2. Fronts and Supply Lines

Domestic
The domestic front or home network is one of engendered values and cultural motifs / the dissemination of a common location. Remembrance Day, the Queen’s birthday, last night of the Proms and so on. These events and others like them are not subjected to journalistic inquiry, they are dutifully recorded. It is interesting to note however that the voices - narrators - are similar to, if not the same as those of the international front (see below).
The prole image carries a payload of place and all of that word’s myriad connotations and definitions / its appearance is that of the law and the lie of the land / of one identifiable body, a continuity of political and social surface binding us to emblematic images. We all - and I mean ALL - mourn the death of Diana, cardiomonarch, or at least that’s what the narrators told us.

Sites
Domesticated, servile and pulling taut the lead that attaches it to its master, the prole image emanates enthusiastically from static, institutionalized sites / emblems of place / Television Centre (Aunties place), ITN’s News at Ten, gliding across the London nightscape until it closes in upon Big Ben. [8]
>> Where were you at 10 o’clock? <<
The prole image’s task upon this domestic front, is to locate / to establish position and place, and catalyze the exchange of identity for the identifiable (remembrance day etc.) / a geodesic sonar of translucent exchange. We can be seen as one nation, in our millions, in the same streets, squares and sporting arenas, and after the allotted time we engage in a discourse - about something which is said to be reflective. [9] Allegiances are borne upon the hoardings / the scene screen compacted and contained becomes no more than a proximal transmitter of the prole image / a locative agent / a beast of burden for the values and surface of the prole image.
Within the domestic front or scene are a number of regional transmission sites, where the prole body bearing a payload of locality and accent / of place / is used to give a sense of community or rather a feeling of closeness. We see the local news dissecting national stories for localized tit-bits. A refractive lens, adjusting the spin, the speed and direction of the prole image so that it impacts accurately, or more appropriately upon our own place, embroiling us in the national and ultimately the globalized surface and its dimensional body.

Payload
Domestication / Napoleon’s shopkeepers nursing bruised cocks trapped in tills / a proud island race dressed in the costumes of aristocratic drama, whispering >> I don’t believe it! << breath stifled and strangulated, squeezing out the colloquialisms / chirpy cheeky working class, thick with accent, with place / humorous in the vox pop, juxtaposed against the clean limbed oral sonority of the presenter giving spin, place, head to tender tentative twitching black and blue cocks.

International
The international front is an ambassadorial scene / our image abroad and of abroad / the relationship of one’s place to the place of others. The most noticeable difference between this front and the domestic front can be found not far above the domestic I emboldened a little earlier / it is a difference of class.
The payload of the proletarian image upon this front is one of policy / pre, present and post / catalytic, supportive and fact. Although many wars may be taking place around the globe, those that are reported tend to be the ones were government/globalized/US policy is most active or apparent, i.e. the Balkans and Iraq. The prole image is orientated and given spin by privileged interlocutors who sacerdotally imbue it with objectivity, truths, raised moral platforms and other such notions befitting of their class - or at least of the values which in terms of the proletariat image and the spin given to it, locate that class - and their diplomatic duties. Though how incongruous the prole image / dissolute whore / appears upon their little hillocks.

Sites
Mobile / drifting down the Congo towards Kurtz, but never quite getting there, always turning back. [10]
Although transmissive sites upon this international front are relatively mobile, or at least have the propensity to be so, they tend to cluster, to mass as a ganglion of twitching nerve cells at the location of world concern. And like a nerve, impulses - prole images - are carried from the central nervous system / the world players / the sites of policy formation and determination, to then act upon the muscle / the public, producing motion / (e)motion. For example the images of the Racak massacre in Kosovo (16/1/99) are extremely emotive. The images, their context - Balkans, Serb = baddie - suggested to me at least that the Serbs where responsible, however, the West has no clear policy, or rather no clearly defined enemy. It is because of this that confusion and ambiguity surrounds the images. [10.1] If the West did have a defined policy, an enemy, then the images would take on a sharper resolution, be more accurately defined via the diplomatic narration of journalism. This does not mean to say that I believe there is some kind of cabal determining world events, but that when an event occurs however unexpected it will be relayed to the public in the form of policy [11] / prompted reactions / non-reactions / apathy.
Where there is public concern upon the world stage, we can locate, even prelocate the transmissive sites of the international front. I earlier referred to the prole image as a whore / well a whore solicits, then fucks / entices, then envelops.
Journalist, cameraman, jeep / mobility, or perhaps more accurately the appearance of being able to move / to be flexible / to respond / our eyes and ears upon a preempted and prepared scene / roving reporters, never quite getting there.

A hand with an indigo swallow tattooed upon it, grips one of the buses’ handrails beside me. I turn to look over my shoulder, there is a blurred and attrited face. A mouth opens within it, and speaks to me in my own voice: >> Sometimes it strikes me / I realize that I’ve never been there, and yet I have become so familiar with places / with locations. As I look out upon what I actually experience, ugly bouts of realization graze the facade / I / not / then / there. Bouts, brief bouts / moments / I am located and here upon my hoarding play policies pertinent to the location of others I will never see, but no doubt discuss. Only promises / never appearance. <<

Payload
Executive / knights / pious in an outer darkness. Beacons amongst the inferior motives of starving, warring primitives / dispassionate observation / policy bias / servile upon the crooked cock of Mickey the Mouse / globalized locative policy / the world through their eyes / preempted.

>> Moreover, the two structures of the message
each occupy their own defined spaces... << [12]

Satellites
>> ...the computer has made possible our satellites which have put a man-made environment around the planet, ending “nature” in the older sense.<< [12.1]

Saturation, the proletariat image rebounded and reflected, an integument of feedback. Self reflected back upon self by communication satellites, orbital mirrors that are able to relocate and multiply the prole image.
The primary unit of exchange and transaction, that is the prole image gives spin to the Earth / enfolds it in a translucent flesh of continuous, live as it happens, whole Earth coverage: >> ...we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. << [13]
This sphere < spherical hoarding < event - mapped as it is by orbiting lenses that with each new passover improve the resolution, increasing the detail with which we view ourselves - fades, drowns beneath the weight of its virtual self, reflected back, live via satellite, a spectacle of narrative ideals.
The control and operation of these orbital mirrors is key to the strategic deployment of the international and domestic payloads of the prole image. My point being, that a nation that controls communication satellites is able to substitute the international and domestic fronts of weaker nations with their own. Culturally dominant payloads impact upon these weaker nations / ripping open markets / developing a susceptibility to the images of consumption, that is, to experience and live out the promise of appearance in the products and institutions of the dominant culture / in the actions and policies of those nations able to deploy satellites - ambassadorial supply lines. >> It compels nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt bourgeois mode of production... it creates a world in its own image. << [14] For example, during the Gulf War, we could see on our national / domestic channels the CNN tag in the corner of our screens - a war in its own image and branded as such.
Fuel dumps / interlocutor. The satellite acts as a logistic supply line for the deployment of foreign correspondents / for the support of the international front, the ambassadorial scene. But it is more than simply support for a few journalists. It is reinforcement of policy / diplomacy via upper-class stooges, fantasizing about objectivity.

To Summarize
The payload or function of the prole image is determined by the spin it is given, not its content or denotative qualities. A prole body devoid of spin and narration is an idle - useless - body / a threat! >> ...the photograph is verbalized in the very moment it is perceived; better, it is only perceived verbalized. << [15] Narration provides structure, political and social surface, removing the denotative qualities of the prole image and replacing them with connotative values. This allows for the use of imagery not directly related to the story, i.e. library footage and stock footage, anything that might look like what’s being talked about. The international and domestic fronts are both subjected to narrative structuring. To (in the UK) voices of authority, i.e. the ruling class, Oxbridge and so on.
In describing the domestic and international fronts, I have attempted to highlight the manner in which different sites - origins - of transmission act upon the prole body / give spin / verbalize and guide, as though the prole image were some kind of smart bomb. The domestic front locates / places, whereas the international front provides policy - a filter / immersed in the mannerisms of a diplomatic class - a synaptic link between locations / between our place and the place of the other. Where there is no international front, there is no other / no prole commodity / no exchange.

And a Bit More
Above, a little while back, I described the prole image devoid of spin as a threat. It is this threat of the prole image, its potential for a debauchery of denotation, that is the catalytic agent of post-modernism’s retreat into language / into verbalization / into being no more than a sub text of connotative values. Reactionary and conservative, post-modernism cowers behind its Maginot line of language / nothing is said as they wank over dictionaries / constructing catenations of words / their world.

And a Bit on The Side
Only domesticated animals could call themselves post-modern / embrace its tenets, and be no more [15.1] than the archaeologists of fossilized ontologies / to examine the extinction of oppositional bodies / to posit that these fossils are proof of an evolutionary superior and better adapted successor.
These animals cower, in awe of the whip / transfixed by the little fruit stickers stuck upon its shaft:

Clementine...

 

3. Surface Continuities of the Political and Social Surface

Political Surface
The virtual - not the plural - comes about because of photography / reproductive / clone-able image.
Pluralism - the idea and image of it - comes about only as the product of the proliferation of the proletariat image and the means to produce it. That is to say that having a lot of images has been confused with a diversity of viewpoints and voices. Historical examples are given, paintings that represent an entire nation, its ideals, political structure and so on. These kinds of examples are flawed as they do not take into account photography - its recent invention (1827 Joseph Nicephore Niepce) and the deterioration of historical evidence. In its superabundance the prole image creates its own continuity, its own democracy.

The prole image has necessarily metastasized into politics, although it is only on the doorstep of number 10. Sometimes it gets invited in, albeit in highly controlled situations and never in situations relating to the operation and function of this locality. The political surface operates outside of the internal machinations of Westminster / a membrane / a conduit between the cunts in power and the people. A membrane that allows for a limited exchange, only, if any.
The political surface is made up of prole imagery / a surface constructed about the norms and standards / values of the international and domestic fronts. The surface’s function is to maintain the values of these fronts, that of a continuous surface of the political and social / to maintain the relationship of the governing body to these fronts.
Hence the need for image makers and spin doctors, alchemists who via lenses transform reality into a dimensional body with its political and social surface of proletariat imagery.
In accepting this pathetic lackey of surface we automatically accept the virtual / spin / stage managed scene. It is the maintenance and control of the prole image its political surface that has become the key means via which democracy or democratic impulses of the people can be assuaged. Recently (Feb 99) for example there has been a controversy, a discussion over the issue of genetically modified foods. Controversy, discussion, these words inadequately describe what has taken place, for how does one describe a relationship between the media and political structures which excludes the people? It seems to me that the media is primed, provided with information from some faceless source, (the opposition perhaps?) it then pricks the Government, the Government reacts, (tomorrow’s story) and the people, well they appear in the form of a phrase, i.e. public opinion and concern.
The people have become alienated from power / from Government, ensnared as they are in their own private scenes of the political and social. The media / the proletariat image has replaced the people, it has become the electorate. A new class power.

Social Surface
The social surface is a surface of mannerisms carried upon our hoardings and preempted by the market, just as international sites are preempted / stage managed. One must present a continuity within the social / display specific and ritualized mannerisms. The social surface is a conduit between the image we assume and those we might possibly interact with. Social exchange and surface - I believe - now exists as a marketplace where visual commodity, the images assumed and assimilated, are exchanged and traded. Exchange takes place only between sympathetic markets. This is to say that we increasingly interact only in terms of appropriation and display. The acceptable is that which maintains the continuity of surface / the virtuality of a social model constructed from the images of need. This virtuality is a materialization of our assumed needs and desires, a conceptual model of the social, fleshed out / covered with the needs and desires expressed and promoted within proletarian imagery. We exist as principles of experience, rather than as a gestalt sum of our own experiences. To function in the social surface one must substitute concept for subject / wear the prole image as though it were a map of the social, a means via which the acceptable can be located.
The social is found to be wanting, something essential is lacking. Its intellect may be clear and precise, but its soul is mad!

 

4. Assume the Image

Visual Commodity
>> The dissident is a body, his dissidence a postural crime... << [15.2]

The hoarding / the scene screen, is site, locus of mediation / interdiction of potential and possibilities, latent unfettered desires. A compressed and contemporaneous surface of the implicit / brand names / scar tissue / corporate ideology and propaganda metastasizing from the corpus of the prole image to the domesticated populous were it is regurgitated / recited faithfully upon their hoardings. Substituting concept for object, (a conceptual desire for that obscure object) it has become enough to simulate / to imply connexion and be adorned - dressed up - in the mantle of the prole image, the surface of one’s own absence. To chant! Hysterical and prostrate before the image, little blue credit card in hand, ready and willing to buy the next version, the next concept-self.
A couple of concepts:

>> Good looks and intelligence were never so accessible. << [15.3]

>> If you visit now, you won’t recognize yourself when you leave. << [15.4]

>> They all dissolve in new solutions. << [15.5]

Proletariat image, eugenicist saviour, without whom we are no more than subhuman - real - prone to defects and infection and ultimately always lacking. Is my skull the correct shape? Does my rib cage look good in this skin colour? Does my fetuses’ bum look big on that ultrasound scan? If it is, if it isn’t, there’s a solution, a new solution, a never quite final solution to help you out / counselors / image makers / suckled on the prole image, surface adepts who can help you function as a viable commodity upon the market of political and social surface.

>> Espirit body spray combines a gentle deoderant with a modern classic perfume to help keep you fresh and fragrant all day long. Use all over your body. << [16]

The overbearing body of the prole image, its cleansing spray of spin, speed and direction is becoming increasingly integrated / conjoined with our bodies. An integument of surfaces / excrescent textures of mediation: fashion / label / orientation of consumption, cover the ID of bodily odour and function. The prole image is, in a consumerist society, a prosthetic image, one that makes up for deficiencies / substitutes concept for object, though not before creating such a need.
>> Debord was right in his counsel that the more we capitulate to a recognition of self in the dominant images of need, the less we understand our own existence and desires. << [17]
Modernism in its artworks and writings recognized the truth of alienation in industrial society / it gave us a chance / the hope of transcendence. Post-modernism gives us no more than the prosthetic image / security blankets / an overabundance of simulated limbs with which to fool ourselves that we can cope with the truth. Post-modernism is the lackey of the machinations of industrial and capitalist societies. In this intellectual surface we are no more than components, seen only in isolation / pluralistic abandon, never, as a gestalt whole.

Carved in language / post-modern verbalization and narrative. Components, subcomponents, industrious in avoiding the real, that which cannot be verbalized.
With the scene compressed about the individual, he/she becomes in a sense prefix / combining form / contextual component of the prole image. Giving the generic / coverall body of the prole image a seemingly specific location and meaning. That is to say each unit >> oh, sorry, << each individual is the location - destination - and locator of the prole image. Offspring. Image begets image in a diluvial outpouring that shall cover the flesh. A contiguous flesh of the political and social, of the banal, of all that is to be expected. We have the God given right to want what is shown to us within the adverts.
Surfaces and textures in which we feel we recognize ourselves / the promise of appearance in political and social surface / a desire to appear there, to assemble the seductive surfaces of the prole image upon our hoardings. To be seductive, a visual commodity where assimilation is all in a Baudrillardian catenation of imagery. Hyper reality / hype / prole body as mediating resource / translucent currency / unit of exchange. We are bought! Exchanging ourselves for the promise of an appearance - though it is a total fucking absence - upon the hoarding / the screen. Our somatic, fleshly selves have simply become carriers, a logistic effort, a strategic site for the projection of prole imagery / dimensional bodies / translucent capital, and all for the sake of a chance appearance. >> It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. << [17.1]
Tangible sensation seems only to lie in the consumption of need / the desire for the buoyant materialist prosthetics of the political and social surface.

A wink: green killer iceberg
A prod: what clement weather we’re having.
Testing, testing ..1..2..3. Perhaps those with nothing to say must arbitrarily test materials, the potentialities of context, condition and process that relate to the material, i.e. the material, the substance orates. The artist in this circumstance does not define art - form, line etc, via some medium - but is him/herself defined by the arbitrary actions and conditions of the chosen material / fetish / the idle observation of chance effect. The artist has become a mere conduit of his/her surroundings / its zeitgeist. A subjugated medium / a collector of objects / lifestyles / proof of involvement with the important concepts that bob upon the political and social surface:
The ephemera of culture, retail therapy, the wrappers, the plastic skins, the insignificant insignia and markings. Crypto-signologists taking it all a little too literally. The computer, the technology enables this or that to happen. They follow! Of course there are important points to be made, about the absence of... and the crisis of... and of course that favoured tautology, excuse and guilt trip, the questioning of context in the context of the context being questioned.

>> I love the smell of art in the morning. <<

The dictionary - Websters New World Dictionary, 1960 - definition of materialism, provides for a more salient exposition of my argument:

Materialism 1. in philosophy, the doctrine that everything in the world, including thought, will, and feeling, can be explained only in terms of matter. 2. the tendency to be more concerned with material than with spiritual values.

also:

Materially 1. with regard to the matter, content, etc. and not the form 2. physically. 3. N/A.

Installation / installed culture / decadent intellectualization, material overburdened, overendowed to such an extent that there is a lack of capacity / an absence of the potential volume of circulatory fluids which would be needed to erect the fallacious statements and values attributed to mere material.
There is of course a little helper, namely that sophist prosthetic the little white square of card with its explanatory prose, which invariably encourages the viewer to collaborate with the artists’ inadequacies. To see what is not there / not represented.
Material subversion / a playful irreverence of previous applications. Questioning? Ooooh! What an interrogation. The contemporary visual art of soft advertizing.

>> We prefer to forsee or seduce; to plan ahead, promise a recovery, or esthetize; to provide social security or make art not too far removed from the level of the media. << [17.2]

Privation
When perhaps once we were members of a society / a nation, we are now, or have become consumers in a market. Individuals whose hoardings gauge the fluxing values of that market / refer to it constantly / flutter in time to ephemeral cycles.
Art is itself without society abandoned to a free - though fixed - market of pluralism, without any common, tangible / original / truth. It is a commodity that refers to itself as being a commodity.
Warhols’ artworks/commodities had a context, a societal context within which to operate. Now Warholian commodity operates within itself - hermetic secessionism - for itself. There is no external context or reality / truth or frisson, only the quotational / the referential rhetoric of advertizers copy.

Those artists, who now no doubt are getting caught up / involved with the millennial party and its overabundance of funding - financial prosthetics for the poor artists, the middle-class scum cry - will necessarily be reflective / of this century. Quotational morons / Warhols’ advertizing copy writers, Duchampian mongrels.

Feminism / female art - though not solely - in the last couple of decades has radicalized art, deconstructed materials / form / portrayal / context / representation, the very means of artistic expression. This period is exhausted. This period has ended. // Bang! //
This is not a camera, it is an expressive limb of my experience, of all that is tangible, original / of all that will be.
I suppose I was brought up on it, embedded in Baudrillardian catenations. Cross legged. Chewing gum. The screen before me. It’s how the world has always been mediated (for me) isn’t it? Palette, medium / TV, video. What else would I paint with? I couldn’t paint with those anachronisms, those romantic notions, to conspire to stretch the flesh of that corpse ever thinner / to become one of those morticians (white cave painters ) who apply make-up for an impossible reanimation.

>> Television is not a credit course in anything, but it very definitely has the marks of a natural environment in which the child forages and finds his way as much as any Indian ever did in the out-of-doors. << [17.3]

The television screen rematerializes objects - something has to fill a vacuum - a surface of representation devoid of the contextual buboes of process painters.

I feel uncomfortable putting brush, pen, pencil to paper, their all there you see, as soon as I make that first mark, out they come, the lice of political and social histories / traditions. With that first mark I’m thinking, is it Groz, Dali, Corot? Is it? Parasites making me itch.
With video however it’s different, when I make a mark I feel nothing of their presence, in fact I don’t even think of them, I just do what I need to do, without conscience, that most misfortunate of virtues.

The task of artists should not be to deconstruct / dismember this centuries corpse / pore endlessly over the necrotic flesh, but to go beyond trivialities, beyond the temporal nature of the millennial and create a new body of triumphs and mistakes on the page before us.

After all, many of us / our children will be spending most of our lives there - in that numerological ulterior.

I know little of 19th century art, and I am already forgetting that of the 20th. Stay here if you want to. I’m going... into that arboreal flicker ahead... that savage light... immense... impenetrable.

 

5. Dimensional Bodies

Repetitive Motion Syndrome
>> The introduction of Dolby Prologic sound system has brought reality to games, but no matter how good the sound and look of a game, it never feels real because all the movement we have come to expect in life is not incorporated into games. << [18]

Fused / conjoined with an intelligence external to our own / with the interactive simulated territories of computer games, the proletariat image becomes a dimensional body of political and social surfaces. Surfaces which operate and react according to the predefined variables / the programmed narration attributed to them. Here - upon the hoarding? - the prole image does more than simply represent / portray / present a likeness. It simulates, that is, it fabricates qualities we believe we have experienced and perceived / qualities appropriated from a common sensory location, that of saturation in the prole body. >> Efficiency, speed and networked communication are in our bones. << [19]
As a child of the 1980s I played computer games, and continue to do so. Throughout this period - the last two decades - there have of course been many changes in graphics and hardware. One consistency, however, is the talk of, and concern with realism, on the part of players and magazines : >> Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro is one step in the right direction of making the computer experience come closer to life; something which has to happen. << [20] Why is it that when one is controlling a cyborg, enjoying the flash and recoil of some outlandish weapon, exterminating populations or dismembering a simulacrum of the human body that one can describe - feel the need to describe - these actions in terms of their realness, even if one has never // really! // experienced such things. The reason for this anomalous realism, is I believe due to our immersion in the body / the offal of the prole image, in what has become our common location, our total sensory domestication within the political and social surface of the proletariat image. Reality it seems no longer relates to any kind of external quantity or quality, but rather to an impoverishment of political and social expectations and emotions within the integument of prole imagery. A simplified realism. A proletarian realism.
Located / involved / connected to a proximal reality. >> Love, fuck that ambiguity, I want realism. << To feel real / to sense reality in the other, the prole image, the virtuality of dimensional bodies. A sympathetic friction between hoardings and proletariat body / a distended integration, image, the promise of reality metastasizing into the body of the player - the receiver. When disease becomes the norm / the only qualitative form of mediation, then seduction only exists in terms of susceptibility to infection. Seduction only exists in the assimilation of surfaces - viral expectations.
Within this proximal reality, the variables, probabilities and possibilities - of simulation - are dimensional limbs / extensions of the player/receivers image saturated psyche / simulacra of desire. Objectives and tasks mirror those of the domestic and international fronts. In this circumstance, upon these translucent terrains however, there is no need for payload / for impact. Here the player/receiver is the agenda / the total location, a pure commodity of savage and prole image conjoined. A commodity of loss and also therefore of a need for potential and possible appearance. A commodity because of its virtuality / its potential for exchange upon the political and social surface of prole imagery.
Depth / space / dimension / somatic receiver, a tangible new object / a rematerialization of what was thought lost. The object returns.

>> The big difference comes when you put on a game which is forcefeed compatible and it springs to life with a mind of its own. << [21]

The reality/event merges with dimensional bodies, with programming, mathmatical language. Computerized effects, smooth the transition from reality (recorded) to fantasy, thus perfecting the surface -maintaining its continuity - of the prole image. A seemingly contiguous - seamless - surface is created, in which simulacra interact with the pre-recorded. The actor is left gaping into thin air or suspended against some blue screen waiting for a simulacrum of Godot. His role, his simulation is being deconstructed, he also is to be domesticated, shorn, and likely to end up doing no more than wearing the masks, the personae of Golden Age celebrity / Monroe / Grant / Bardot... a carrier for the political and social surface of Old Testament proletarian imagery.

The internet is mediator/interlocutor between the savage ontology and the political and social surface of the prole image.
Info-fucking-mation structures - perhaps scriptures - the compressed and efficiently packaged scene screen, linked / networked into a web - where social behaviour/communication come under the auspices of the division of labour - in which the vibrations of other, similarly linked scene screens can be felt in a tremulous communication. >> In the electric age, when our central nervous system is technologically extended to involve us in the whole of mankind and to incorporate the whole of mankind in us... << [21.1]
The Net / transparent and spaceless grid / born of or for the compressed scene screen / developed by the US military (a non-centrist command structure) / an exploding payload of electronic litter / collateral damage / alienation glorified in a wash of communicative textures - language. The scene screen immerses itself / anonymously / before innumerable eyes, without embarrassment at such exposure and scrutiny. Being no more than an actor upon its own internal stage, encouraged to make itself seen as a viable commodity / to look in upon itself in a performance projected into the ulterior, rather than the immediate exterior. A performance for the censor, as opposed to one of need. The Net is designed for this performance / it is a mechanism of the ulterior / the beyond / able to project and receive from and into this non-space / this political and social surface of the proletariat image populated by non-beings and dimensional bodies / corpulent / obese.

 

6. Opening Moves

Assassin / The Break with Continuity
Hand held image weapon projecting, then ejecting slides. Sound-byte, photo-op broken, media guerrilla stealing light, the event / becoming the news. Visual inserts / images splatter across face of politician (fired from image weapon) in order to steal/disrupt the virtual event, i.e. the political surface is interrupted. In breaking this continuity an event is formed. This new event however, in order to be successful must be incongruous, of no contiguous value lest it become recorded / neutralized as a part of the narrative structure / the banal spectacle of the everyday.

Stealing light / event. Video painting? The political surface is made up of light - before we hear its voice, we are hit by the opaque light of its image.
An event - a reality - emerges in the rupture of continuity. Continuity is the imposition of narrative / social hierarchy / history / of every inbred assumption of the international and domestic surfaces.

Dehiscence.

We must liberate ourselves via the creation of events not conducive to the surface / the facade of language / the integument of political and social hierarchy, lest we should continue to contrive to write tracts such as these, distanced, disturbed, soft clouds billowing. Manipulated lies... Bending truths.

Means of Transmission
Where the subjectivity and expression of imagination is the only defence against the totalitarian surface of commonality and the banal.
Savages in the muscle, the marrow, up now, to the skin! Be civilized! Banal. Corporeal architecture, assume the image. The mud of theory. Wading knee deep. That gaunt figure, breath materializing in razored air, Lovecraftian sentinel, harlequin... >> The surgeon who would be quite helpless if he were to become humanly involved in his operation. << (see [21.1]) The trucks roll on, roll past, TV’s upon their backs, footage of tanks, roll on, roll past. Gravity pulling at the free arc of a decapitated head. Trained machine guns embedded. Wan smooth corpses call out: >> Shoot me I’m dead! << The undulating pavement sighs. Blank. Detritus of thought, sediment disturbed. All hands to the right, buttoned mouse, pressed. Up-down hooks on hands, attached. Pecking orders. Like I could care less. Should try. They dance like caged tigers. Frail porcelain or fat red-faced bourgeois. Just not lean. No zeal. >> I got blue eyes. << Camberwick Green is burning, hip hip hoorah. He sold me humiliation. Elaborate functions, baroque counter-wiring fluxing through bone, through nervous system.

My imagination, beyond your fucking image. To seize ones imagination and wield it!

Epitaph

Within this text I have tried to show that the political and social surface of proletarian imagery is an overbearing narrative structure, a policing mechanism used to suppress the savage, the human in favour of a conceptual or virtual model more suitable and more able to be exchanged upon the political and social surface. The screen in one form or another is the dominant form of mediation, the means via which we interact with the political and social surface of proletarian imagery / via which I sit here amongst this domesticated mass / alienated / lost in a wash of textural, editorial feedback. Wading through my own shit. Searching...
I know that happiness does not exist, or at least only exists as an awareness of alignment within the proletarian surface. The more one looks and acts the same as, the more content and reassured one is. The more one deviates.. sniff.. sniff.. is that Zyclon B I can smell...

>>The Banality.... The Banality.<<

 

 

Notes

0. Anna Wary, Introduction to Aurora by Michel Leiris.
0.1 Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought,(Ctheory webpage) (Sens & Tonka, eds., Collection Morsure, Paris, 1994)
1. Guy Debord, The society of Spectacle and other Films, Rebel Press, 1992.
2. Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics, Semiotext(e), 1986.
3. ...3. the part of an automobile, etc. that transmits motive force from the engine to the wheels, as by the gears... Dictionary definition of transmission, Webster’s New World Dictionary, 1960.
4. ...and gave you hope, that bastard, that better dressed, better looking fucker who drags you down the path to something, but then seeing something better drags you onward, and so on, and on... Prose, D.D.Wildblood, 1997.
5. For example, the title/introduction sequence to Channel Five news, 1998, advert for Sky news, June 1998.
6. >> Theirs is not to convey truth, but to carry my designs of velocity and trajectory. << - Frederick the Virtual addressing a battalion of prole images before launch.
7. They have no reason, and in a state of passive observance count the corpses, moaning remonstratively about the inferiority of motives.
8. Place where democrats sit in a palace.
9. i.e., soaps etc, which are said to be reflective of contemporary trends and issues, though simply reflect the axioms of the prole body, its political and social surface.
10. Why being something they don’t want to know.
10.1 Since writing this section, this Wests policy has become a little more defined, responsibility for the incident now rests firmly with the Serbs.
11. There are too many gatekeepers between the site of transmission and point of reception for it to be anything other than policy.
12. Roland Barthes, Fontana Pocket Readers BARTHES Selected Writings Introduced by Susan Sontag, Fontant, 1982. Extract from the photographic Message.
12.1 Marshall McLuhan / Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, Hardwired, 1997.
13. Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
14. Ibid.
15. Roland Barthes, Fontana Pocket Readers BARTHES Selected Writings Introduced by Susan Sontag, Fontant, 1982. Extract from the photographic Message.
15.1. and be no more.
15.2 Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics, Semiotext(e), 1986.
15.3 MAZDA, advert (22nd NOV 1998, The Sunday Review, The Independent on Sunday.)
15.4 Selfridges&co, advert (22nd NOV 1998, The Sunday Review, The Independent on Sunday.)
15.5 Radox, advert (22nd NOV 1998, The Sunday Review, The Independent on Sunday.)
16. Espirit body spray, blurb on can.
17. John Zerzan, Future Primitive and other essays, Autonomedia, 1994.
17.1 John Berger, Ways of Seeing.
17.2 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, (Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900 - 1990, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998).
17.3 Marshall McLuhan / Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, Hardwired, 1997.
18. A Joy for the Game Show, (joystick review) Mike Fisher, Yorkshire Post, 18/8/98.
19. Gore Vidal in New York Review of Books, March 1984.
20. A Joy for the Game Show, (joystick review) Mike Fisher, Yorkshire Post, 18/8/98.
21. Ibid.
21.1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, London, 1964.

Bibliography

Primary Sources
Michal Archer, Art Since 1960, Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1997.
Roland Barthes, Barthes: Selected Writings Introduced by Susan Sontag, Fontana, 1982.
Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, Semiotext(e) / Pluto, 1990.
Jean Baudrillard, Radical Thought,(Ctheory webpage) (Sens & Tonka, eds., Collection Morsure, Paris, 1994).
Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Power Publications, 1995.
John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin Books, 1972.
Kenneth Clarke, Landscape into Art.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Penguin Popular Classics, 1994.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle and other Films, Rebel Press, 1992.
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory 1900 - 1990, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1998.
Michael Heim, Metaphysics of Virtual Reality.
Marshall McLuhan / Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village, Hardwired, 1997.
Paul Virilio, Speed & Politics, Semiotext(e), 1986.
John Zerzan, Future Primitive and other essays, Autonomedia, 1994.

Secondary Sources
J.I. Aldapeurta, The Eyes, Headpress, 1995.
Anthony Burgess, Clockwork Orange, Penguin Books, 1986.
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Bob Dylan, Tarantula.
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Karl French on Apocalypse Now Bloomsbury Movie Guide No.1, 1998.
Headpress, Irregular/Quarterly journal of Sex, Religion and Death.
Theodore Kacynski, Unabomber Manifesto.
Michel Leiris, Aurora, Atlas Press, 1990.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince.
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto.
Pauline Reage, Story of O, Corgi, 1976.
Virgil, The Geordics.
Virgil, The Eclogues.

WebSites

Ctheory - http://www.ctheory.com/
Kaspahraster Homepage - http://www.teleport.com/~jaheriot/kr.htm
The Post-Technology Project - http://www.bestweb.net/~jfiliss/index.htm
The Transhuman Web Alliance - http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Alliance/

 

The Suppression of Savage Customs

D.D.Wildblood