pressessence

The new issue of Letters ‘anti-politcal communist journal’ is the pretext for these links:

http://littleblackcart.com/index.php?main_page=product_book_info&products_id=474&zenid=1c12c4c798c9b7ce082878c877fe6393

http://www.lettersjournal.org/

http://salondeverluisant.org/index.php

I am a female, I am moderately disabled, I am aged approximately 20 years. I have coped up to this point. I have immersed myself. I have marshalled my energies and concentrated on achievements. I have been busy with getting on with things.

I have never been loved as I have wished to be loved. I wish for a husband, I wish to make babies. I wish to be loved. I wish to be loved. I wish to be loved. One day, upon returning from my studies to my parents house, I speak excitedly of my student boy-friend. I am quite beside myself with excitement and good feelings. My parents ask me questions about him, they want to meet him. They are very pleased for me. Their pleasure indicates their initial lack of expectations.

I call him up. He makes it plain he is not my boyfriend, he hardly knows me, and he could never think of me on those terms. And in fact, what he says is true. The whole story about a boyfriend is made up. I have never had a boyfriend. I have mistaken my fantasy about him for reality. I got carried away about a future life together in my head.

Now, after that stupid phone call it has all fallen apart. Even the fantasy is unsustainable. When my parents ask me what is going on, I become enraged at them. Why did they bring me into the world? Why do I exist? Why must I spend the entirety of this existence, which is not secured by reincarnation, which is not underwritten by paradisical eternity, why must I live in this inadequate state? I don’t want to be who I am, don’t they understand that?

Why must I be conscious of this self? Why must who I am diverge so radically from what I really am? Tell me, explain the difference because I don’t know. I want to be loved. I want to make babies. I do not want to struggle to be accepted as a unit of all possible individuation. I don’t want to be the living indicator of diversity. I don’t want to be embraced as being different. It means nothing to me to consider myself as a modification, an evolutionary anomaly, an aspect of the range of possible humanity. My self wants an appropriate body for my self. I am having a breakdown. I am hurt. I am hurt.

My mother turns away shocked. My parents are angry at my distress. They have never discussed my disability because they always wanted to pretend that I could lead a normal life. We have never mourned together, we have never mourned my occupation of the space that might have been occupied by someone more appropriate.

They are angry at my breakdown, they say I lied about my boyfriend and they blame me for seducing them into that briefly flieckering island of false hopes. They too want to belief in my capacity for normality. They are angry Buddhistically. Buddhism has always been the most angry of the religions.

My father is filled with contempt for my weakness. He takes off his hat, it is black and lined with red, and tells me a story, ‘consider how the trees blossom in march. And the hail, which destroys the blossoms, also appears in March. The season of hail and strong winds is the worst moment for ensuring successful fertilisation. But the trees have no ‘choice’ other than to flower at this moment because they require the full summer to ripen their fruit. And the hail storms are also an invarient in the relation; they occur at a level above evolutionary ‘choice’, they are the product and sign of the energies which are amassing in the season we call spring. Because they cannot avoid hostile climatic conditions the trees have no choice but to proliferate their flowerings during that dangerous month. They must manifest flowers in unsurpassed quantity at the point where the chances of successful reproduction is most threatened. They are bound by external pressures to fill all available space in their branches with white. It is a strategy designed to ensure that at least some of the flowers will go on to develop into fruit.’
.’

Debord’s most scintillating lines were not his own, and of those jewel-like sentences, for which he alone seemed capable of discovering a true setting, the most resistant to erosion by a wider reception were those lines which addressed receptivity itself:

[quote]These comments are sure to be welcomed by fifty or sixty people; a large number given the times in which we live and the gravity of the matters under discussion. But But then, of course, in some circles I am considered to be an authority. It must also be borne in mind that a good half of this interested elite will consist of people who devote themselves to maintaining the spectacular system of domination, and the other half of people who persist in doing quite the opposite. Having, then, to take account of readers who are both attentive and diversely influential, I obviously cannot speak with complete freedom. Above all, I must take care not to give too much information to just anybody.[/quote]

Debord had spent much of his career gnawing at the issue of reception of ideas, and during the break of the SI focused on it with savage intensity in his attacks upon what we called the ‘pro-situs’. The radical introduction of this concept in 1980 – the contrary supposition that not everyone was readied to receive certain information concerning society – has still not filtered through to the propagandists of the left whose frenzied leaflets and torturous articles continue to accumulate like middens, without objective reciprocity or mass readership.

Whilst it is fair to say that although the idea of non-communicability of ideas had never occurred to me before reading Debord I have since made something of a life’s work out of it. Even so, this recognition of an absence of a natural readership, the idea of writing into an abyss of indifference, the dislocation of scales between that actual possible level of communication and the infinite potentialities of connection apparently inherent within mass communication/distribution industries, was not Debord’s invention. The opening lines to [i]Comments[/i] are probably derived from Stendhal’s [i]On Love[/i] where the readership is anticipated within the various prefaces to be somewhere between 100 and 17. Alternatively, he may have purloined the idea from the radically pessimistic Macho de Assis who also steals from Stendhal for a framing mechanism for his novel [i]Epitaph of a Small Winner[/i]:

[quote]When we learn from Stendhal that he wrote one of his books for only a hundred readers, we are both astonished and disturbed. The world will be neither astonished nor, probably, disturbed if the present book has not one hundred readers like Stendhal’s, nor fifty, nor twenty, nor even ten. Ten? Maybe five. [/quote]

We are astonished and disturbed, because it is assumed we begin each stage of our life’s journey by considering ourselves, alternatively, as good as the next man, a man of the world, somebody easy to get on with and a fellow with catholic tastes. It is not pleasant to discover that we perhaps will connect, really connect, with only a handful of people in our entire lifetime. Yes, astonishing and disturbing to consider the series of discrepancies that exist between the piles of newly printed literature and the numbers that will eventually be sold, between those sold and those read, between those read and those understood, between those producive of understanding and those producive of common perspective.

Whether confirmed within theories derived from the precepts and departures from hermeneutics, or suspected in life experience, the reality of limited possible connection with others, is encountered as a block on all but the most sentimental and simple images, ideas and enthusiasms. In fact, as individuals we exist in a local niche, and this niche combines cell-like with others to form an aggregate of unbreachable proximity – the chagrinned narrator quickly encounters the improbable potential for mass communication of difficult concepts, but continues anyway.

And so it is that we contemplate the recorded reader statistics for the Monsieur Dupont wikipedia page (214 in December 2008, 260 in August, 233 in May). Stendhal would have been delighted with such attention and yet, numbers of readers are rarely translated into wished-for readers. To return to Debord’s insight, ‘It must also be borne in mind that a good half of this interested elite will consist of people who devote themselves to maintaining the spectacular system of domination...’ and so it is that most readers in cyberspace are electronic, and of those that are human only a fraction, in their ones and twos, take time to think and connect genuinely between their clickings with what they have read.

There is a terrible precarity which exists within communication technology for those who are attempting to communicate something other than the mere electronic connection itself. It becomes a habit to speak into the silence, into the void, and then, when another responds, we ask, how should we conduct ourselves? We are immediately aware that this is no reciprocal correspondence, in which, in order to defend the bond, each is permitted error of tone and content. Internet connection resembles more a speed dating performance and not armed with any insight into the other’s strict criteria for reciprocity.

It is now a convention that many ‘personal’ communications within the internet do not proceed beyond initial connection; there is a response and an eager response to the response, then there is silence. Why did ‘A’ who said, ‘I so agreed with what you said’, not respond when I enthusiastically asked him to explain further? Why did ‘Z’ not reply after initially telling me his life story? What is it that ‘N’ favourably consumed in my disembodied words that causes him now to refuse to discuss them within a direct relation? We can only conclude that there is a paradoxical but objective tendency within mass communications media towards silence which is achieved by serial, multiple, unsustained connections that in each instance articulate a cancelling out of previous connections, a falling away from each other, a mutual disconnection.

The second issue of Letters is finished, featuring an investigation into DIY and factory work, a dialogue about Manifesto Against Labour by Gruppe Krisis, and some other things.

For a paper copy, please send a donation of postage to:

Letters c/o Liberation Projects
838 East High Street #115
Lexington, KY 40502 USA

International orders please send an email to editor(at)lettersjournal.org. Correspondence and criticism welcome.

www.lettersjournal.org

What Letters seems to be all about:

generally, the same dispiriting explorations of brutal design and political dead-ends. It looks something like a topy/ptv fanzine from 1983 but with no articles on william burroughs. I wrote the text on the German Ideology and DIY culture, some other people discuss Gruppe Krisis which hasn't sparked a discussion here: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=3077 whilst still others, or some of the same, talk about why the term pro-revolutionary (as first used in the monsieur dupont fuel protest leaflet) was probably a mistake. In other words, Letters is a bit better than any other magazine currently available (but not by much!)

UK/Europe: Paper copies are available from me.