Thoughts on Woody Guthrie

“I believe that when ya pray, you’re tryin’ ta get yer thinkin’ straight, tryin’ ta see what’s wrong with th’ world, an’ who’s ta bame fer it. Part of it is crooks, crooked laws, an’ jist dam greedy people, people that’s afraid of this an’ afraid of that. Part of it’s all of this, an’ part of it’s jist dam shore our own fault…”

 

 

Woody Guthrie, the folk singer of 1930s-50s migratory America, travelling homeless for years over the huge country, stowed away on freight trains and boxcars, singing for small change to the masses of poor people who were hoping to find work and a life somewhere. I bought his autobiography Bound for Glory looking for a vision that the ABH might relate to, of an artist giving his work to grass roots people for their liberation and empowerment. The book really only gets to all that in the last third, but it did get there.

The nature of his approach is very ABH-ish in the following respects: his music is simple enough to play anywhere. He just needs his guitar. He didn’t need a venue or a mic or what-have-you (although he often played in bars for the change he was living on). His songs responded to his moment of history. To work, poverty, exploitation, drink, prostitution, injustice, mortality, TB, racism, ships and trains, beauty, war, the love of his people, and the love of a beautiful land. His songs distinguished between sheep and shepherds, oppressor and oppressed, the many and the few. His songs critiqued injustice and oppression. His songs incited social and spiritual dialogue among grass roots people. He rejected the money and the reputation that came with the rich bars and restaurants, opting instead for solidarity with the poor. The people could join in with his music. His music created situations that unified people in a shared social/spiritual experience.

Maybe the most vivid episode comes after he’s been a travelling homeless musician for some years and he arrives in New York. There he auditions for a steady job in a fancy restaurant high up in the Rockefeller building, but he walks out of the room once the managers start talking about make-up and show tunes and dressing him up like a clown. Down in the lobby he starts playing his songs, dumbfounding everyone there with the spectacle. He then walks out and all over Manhattan till after dark, playing songs and accumulating a crowd of people as he goes. These stories are about the people, about unity, solidarity, community, sharing joy, sharing pain and so on. Scene after scene he brings crowds of people together like this.

It’s a very ABH picture and I think we’ve created our own similar scenes to similar ends. I wanted to spend some time thinking about some of the differences between Woody Guthrie’s migratory America of the 1930’s and our 21st century British scene.

Migratory America is made of masses of very poor people and families moving around and looking for work. A virtually homeless class looking to build a life from scratch. They dreamed of putting roots down. It was sort of a blank canvass… a developing country with only developing infrastructure. It was still young in its cultural story. What would this country become? What would it end up looking like? What kinds of politics and economics would prevail? And it was only just the dawn of mass culture, and music was not yet heavily mediated. If you heard the sound of music, probably someone was sat there playing it. To hear it on the radio was a novelty.

21st Century Britain is made up largely of a homogenous mass of private individuals and families, each in their own private space, working essentially to maintain their position in the consumerist programme. This is a developed country that has become all that it will ever be (or, that the feeling anyway), and has found itself in a kind of spiritual crisis – utterly disillusioned with all it has managed to become. It is in the thick of the process of mediating life in its entirety, a process which has cheapened the value of music along with everything else by making it commonplace and unreal.

So while Guthrie’s Americans were a people being formed, we are a people being dismantled. While their American story was young, unwritten and full of possibilities, ours is old, exhausted and heavy with boredom. While the popular music of migratory America came largely from the voices and hands of ordinary people, our popular music has been absorbed into mediums and commodified. The ordinary people only imitate the music that the powerful mediate to them.

What do these distinctions mean for ABH practice?

Firstly, the deconstruction of our peoplehood only calls all the louder for public music in public space for public ears and public participation. The difference is that, for us, it is a subversive act, which I don’t think it was for Guthrie so much. For them it was a step towards something. For us it is a radical about turn, a non-compliance with the general direction of things.

Secondly, and similarly, the absorption of popular music into the hands of the powerful, who hold the keys to mass culture, only reinforces the need for local, live, grass-roots manifestations of art, without technological mediums between giver and receiver, and without a third party of beneficiaries, labels, advertisers and sponsors and such hovering around the edges, diluting total public ownership. Guthrie was not an artist being marketed to the people, he was one of the people and the sincerity and power of that connection was possible because of the general absence of mediums or third parties. Again, the difference is that for us it is an act of subversion to work outside the structures that have become ubiquitous – that claim to be a totality with no possibility of life outside or beyond itself.

The third consideration seems most layered and poignant to me right now. That is, the difference between being at the beginning or the end of a historical narrative… the rise of a nation, or the fall of one. It follows that Guthrie’s songs may be loaded with a certain steadfast hope about where they might be headed as a people, whereas ours are necessarily loaded with lament about where we’ve got to. What kind of hope do we project into a time like this? That is, towards which new possibilities do we energise each other? Lament for its own sake is of no interest to us.

In 2004 I asked a lot of Christians whether they thought that we as a people could change or be changed for the better. The answer was ‘no’ every time. Human history had to be seen as a downward spiral, and ours looked like the sorriest case. But my conviction was that we had to contend for liberation through repentance, and that it had to be possible. Maybe the people would never accept the subversive dare to, against the empire’s wishes, turn around and stare in the face of God, but they could. It has to be a genuine possibility, and not just a joke. My conviction was that a person has to contend for this possibility, or be a liar when he prays May Your Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven…

The hope is in God’s very odd response to repentance. What kind of power does this nearly unutterable incantation release? What new and unforeseen possibilities? The empire denies and forbids the recognition of any power greater than itself, but if we were to rebel and give our attention to such a power, what would we find? A power like the empire, only more so? Or different in kind, releasing a whole other lot of possibilities? It will surprise us every time, even if we thought we already understood it. It is not a purely historical hope, but it not a purely super-historical hope either. As the prayer above suggests it has to be absolutely both.

We should consider the subject further soon.

The Prophetic Aesthetic: A Manifesto

The Army of the Broken Hearted as an arts collective has taken a particular approach – the school of artists as the school of prophets. For now we will call it the prophetic aesthetic.

• The art of the prophetic aesthetic is concerned with its own moment in history.
• The art of the prophetic aesthetic is concerned with how its own moment in history fits in the wider historical process.
• The art of the prophetic aesthetic is concerned with its own people – that is, the people it manifests itself among.
• The practitioner of the prophetic aesthetic tells the people’s story to the people and so reveals their identity as a people by virtue of their shared story.
• The prophetic aesthetic distinguishes between the sheep and the shepherds, between the people and their leaders. They hold the shepherds accountable in the eyes of the sheep for their actions regarding the sheep. They energise the sheep towards a critical consciousness regarding their shepherds.
• The prophetic aesthetic tears down and it builds up. It deconstructs the oppressions and illusions that hang over the people, and it construct the alternative community: the people of God.
• The prophetic aesthetic aims to give solid form to the apparent and yet elusive power structures which oppress the people, since it hard, as they say, to kill a phantom.
• The prophetic aesthetic asserts that a people who no longer participate in the creation of culture are, in that respect, a dead people. Therefore, the rich minority who hold the monopoly on the creation of culture through mass mediums in the name of profit are, in that sense, killing the people. This is the essence of mass culture.
• Therefore, the creation of culture must be restored to everyday people outside the absorbing and monolithic structures of mass culture.
• Therefore, art itself must be wrestled free from the pacifying and compromised narratives of mass culture.
• The work of the prophetic aesthetic is forged in dialogue with God.
• The work of the prophetic aesthetic is forged in dialogue with each other.
• The practitioner is the least important party in his/her own work. The art of the prophetic aesthetic is for God and for the people. Both, equally, necessarily. It is the relation between these two parties that definitively concerns the prophetic.
• On the other hand the practitioner is utterly indivisible from his/her work. They are not impartial conduits for a message. They themselves are the message. The word they speak must be absorbed into their life and their life must be absorbed into the word they speak. This is the essence of authentic culture.
• The practitioner of the prophetic aesthetic probably has a day job. Their art must grow out of the common experience of the people. Their art cannot be pursued as a career path out of the common experience of the people. The prophetic aesthetic is for the people and of the people.
• The work of the prophetic aesthetic is not designed for dissemination via the mediums of mass culture. Its fulfillment is in its actual, local and vital manifestation, among the people who may be met and known by the practitioner. Any mediation of the work must be strictly understood as replication and not the work itself.
• The work of the prophetic aesthetic is not designed for consumption by a mass audience. The work of the prophetic aesthetic must always be for the edification of the people that the artist lives alongside, face to face, in dialogue. Family, friends, enemies, colleagues, and the other dwellers of their own towns and cities etc.
• The prophetic aesthetic treasures public space for its expression.
• The prophetic aesthetic treasures domestic space for its expression.
• The prophetic aesthetic does not treasure commercial space for its expression.
• Since the prophetic aesthetic necessarily concerns the people, it is not to be merely received. It invites dialogue, response, and participation. The prophetic aesthetic seeks to pose questions to be answered and problems to be solved, regarding the moment of history that we occupy as a people. It invites everyday people back to the humanising commission – to create their own culture.
• The prophetic aesthetic begins and ends in God who precedes and outlasts the present empire and all its constructs – that the oppressions and enslavements of our times might be subject not only to scrutiny but also to power, and that the Source of liberation might be different in kind to the source of oppression.

WHY WE LEFT THE VENUES AND TOOK TO THE STREETS

…An absurd title since we play our music in venues quite often. We only just played the Kitchen Garden Cafe in Kings Heath the other day and we had a good time. It was there afterwards we were discussing the question of whether or not it was our business to play in venues at all. On our more radical days we say No, never! On other days we say sometimes… if its purposeful and if its fun. But either way, we all know that the home of our music is in public space and in domestic space. Our forays into commercial spaces can only be novel excursions to where we don’t belong, because the commercial spaces, as they stand, cannot be the forum for the authentic culture of our people. And why not?

There is a tension on the lower rungs of the music scene’s ladder between three parties: the band, the audience and the promoter (and all the while a fourth party hovers invisibly over the whole thing). It is the promoters’ general method to ask the bands to bring an audience. Oddly, there is little pretense anymore that the bands are there to entertain the audiences. The “audiences” dutifully show up at the request of the bands, to pose as an audience so that the bands may entertain their own vision of themselves as cultural deities (as rock gods, or pop idols, or bohemian poets or what have you) – a vision that we’ve swallowed whole from the ever present fourth party, mass culture. Not only has the audience become a means to the bands’ ends for the evening, it is usually the case that the evening is not an ends in itself either, it has become the means to a higher goal. We are not partying for the sake of partying, we are merely creating the illusion of a party as a fanciful launch pad toward careers in the music business, and this whole notion is yet another vision swallowed whole from the narratives of mass culture. The poor terracotta audiences, stood there with beer in one hand and coat in the other, are under no illusions that they’re there to be entertained, energised or edified – or that they’re there to party. This is so horribly obvious from the rotation of three or four or five different audiences in one night, standing patiently to gratify the vision of their friends’ band and disappearing long before the next band has plugged in.

This means two things. One: the music scene is not for the people. It exists to aid the bands’ (usually vain) attempt to escape the cultural insignificance of the people, and to enter mass culture’s designated realm of fame and glory. Two: the music scene is not for the moment. These moments are contrived as mere stepping stones towards a career path misleadingly dangled before the people. The whole structure affirms and reinforces mass culture’s stranglehold over the people. The whole structure asserts mass culture as the only realm of significance and power, and as the ultimate judge of the legitimacy of all cultural expression. The whole structure presumptuously assumes the total cultural insignificance of the life of the everyday people – the hair dresser, the bus driver, the office worker. In this structure, the only possibility of realisation is that an ‘artist’ might propitiate mass culture enough, and that mass culture just might graciously respond by sweeping the person up out of the venue and into their celestial place.

The venues of the music scene are generally complicit with this structure in their imitation of mass culture’s theatrics. The stage – that the artists might be elevated above the audience, the lighting – that the artists alone might be shrouded in the illusion of glory, and the PA – that the artist’s voice be given the illusion of a god-like prescience over everyone else’s. Obviously we buy our ticket to see and hear the artist, but it is the familiarity of this scene as a pale replica of mass culture’s realm of glory that reveals it to be, not an entertaining show in the manner of the circus or the stage play, but the yearning of an oppressed people who would prefer to be in the seat of the oppressor. Even if the artist truly innovates, the scene still imitates and the artist is stuck within that narrative.

Up the ladder a few rungs there are artists that we see because we are genuinely edified and energised by what they do. But even so, mass culture’s oppressive structure still looms. I saw Carina Round play a set at the Hare & Hounds a while ago, and we the audience were there to see Carina Round (and not to entertain her vanities!). The guy from the Wonder Stuff got up to do a song with her at one point, and before he left the stage he gave his final word down the microphone. His sentiment was roughly this: that Carina Round is an exceptional artist and sooner or later the media will wake up and realise that. But what a patronising and presumptuous message! It asserts the oppressive dogma that Round’s art is illegitimate until acknowledged and canonised by mass culture. And it asserts that this electrifying evening was merely a means to an end, that all we were participating in was part of Round’s ongoing process of propitiating the oppressor (an assertion that does her art no justice). Those words spoken turn the whole thing into a sham. They relocate the place of meaning and vitality out of that room and into the mysterious and god-like will of mass culture.

The structure is the same on every rung of its ladder. It hangs oppressively over the bands who have fans, and those who merely have friends. It hangs oppressively over the artists we think are good, just the same as those we don’t. It hangs oppressively over the music scenes we call ‘dead’, and those we call vibrant, since we only call them vibrant because some of the local acts have been accepted by mass culture into its inner ring. In the X Factor, that most diabolical expression of this oppression, which the bands, promoters and audiences alike all despise, the structure stands just the same as it does in the local venue. Both say that the people have no culture except that which mass culture recognises, and that the songs of a hair-dresser do not count until her face is coopted into the visage of mass culture and her songs are coopted to generate capital – until she is no longer a hair-dresser and no longer one of the people.

It is this assumption of the artist’s mercenary self-interest (which is synonymous with our waning late capitalist era) and of the artist’s obedient recognition of mass culture’s hierarchical order, that made our words and music quite impotent in many venues. The ABH is unambiguously a spiritually and socially motivated collective. Our interest has been in our people, in our social awakening, in a spiritual liberation, and in the subversive and critical power of our repentance. But whatever radical, revolutionary, compassionate or offensive word we wished to speak in the commercial venues of the music scene, they seemed to be immediately emptied of any significance, because the structure doesn’t allow for the possibility that the word spoken is ultimately for the people and not for the artist’s own glory. Indeed, whatever vile and disgusting sentiments might be expressed are equally tolerable, because any word spoken in that realm is meaningless by virtue of the whole charade.

So it was for these sorts of reasons that the ABH took to the streets. People join in with us when we play on the streets, because the environment carries none of the alienating exclusivity of the venues. People dance to our music on the streets, because it is clear that we came to the people’s realm to play for the people, and not, in some underhand way, for ourselves. People discuss, debate, agree and disagree with the words we speak onto the streets, because outside of its designated forums mass culture loses its remarkable power to translate the word of the people into nothingness and insignificance.

There are certainly venues, promoters and acts which are striving in various ways to overcome – the forerunners of new things, I hope. In order for the people to recapture a culture that is genuinely of the people and for the people – a culture that is genuinely our own and not some bid for acceptance by the mass culture that bears over us – we need to work outside mass culture’s spaces, outside mass culture’s mediums, and outside mass culture’s narratives of fame and glory. It may be that there, speaking our own word in our own space, we might begin to ask ourselves the questions that truly concern us.

This is a call to practitioners. We will not suggest giving up using commercial spaces, or pusuing commercial aims. But if our work is in any sense, for our people, the dare is to take it to the people. To play where we shouldn’t – in the unauthorised venues of public space, where our voices are somehow our own again.

The first ever ABH gig, under a railway bridge in Digbeth..

This Post is Sponsored by the Global Slave Market

 

A remarkable stand-off occurred recently between employees and management at the huge Chinese manufacturing company Foxconn. These are the people who make all our Apple stuff, Microsoft, Dell, Sony, Nokia, Samsung, Acer etc. In fact, they manufacture about a third of all the electronics we use in the west – including the computer I am writing this on, and quite possibly the one you’re reading this on.

So it was that 150 Foxconn employees took their stand on a factory roof, threatening mass suicide if their managers refused to renegotiate their working conditions. In 2010 fourteen employees followed through and died in a similar stand-off, and now many Foxconn factories are rigged with nets to curb the suicide attempts.

Foxconn employees (who number in the hundreds of thousands) are working shifts of twelve to sixteen hours a day at 30p an hour. They are patrolled and filmed to make sure they’re working in silence as they piece together our phones and laptops with their fingers in long, long human production lines. There are workers as young as twelve, and at night they don’t go home, they bunk up in cramped dorms on factory grounds. This is their life. This is my computer. This is your phone.

I’m at a loss. Are Microsoft and Apple less to blame than Foxconn? Am I less to blame than Apple and Microsoft? Can we imagine any way of living and doing business that doesn’t rely on this kind of slavery? How do we even begin to opt out? I don’t know where to start, besides repentance. All ideas are welcome..

LEVESON: WHY THE POWERLESS CAN DO WHAT THE POWERFUL CAN’T

We’ve been belly-aching against The Sun.

Here’s three thoughts on the Leveson Enquiry. Two bad ones and one good.

1. The Leveson Enquiry hears evidence and testimonies, but we are not shocked. We already knew the tabloids were chasing glamourous women down alleyways. We knew about their harassing grieving families. We already knew they’ve stalked and spied and hacked into the lives of whoever they chose. The defense of tabloid journalists is repeated over and over: but we’ve always done it like this… what’s the problem? In this sense its not really the tabloids on trial, since they did all their evil in plain sight. On trial is a society that has knowingly hosted all this evil for years… an order that happily handed its people over to that racket of profiteers, to live under their dark narratives.

2. The Leveson Enquiry can bring no real change. We hope for regulations to be put in place, but any such regulation may be seen as the empire’s empty gesture to a people who need reassuring that they’re not being fooled around by their masters. Such ‘changes’ from the top are a means of curbing the possibility of the real change that comes from the people.

If we imagine the unimaginable, that the enquiry results in the shutting down of the Sun and all it’s derivatives, we see that even this does the people no good. They would just feel that the men in suits are patronising them and confiscating a part of their identity. They would continue to identify themselves with that enslaving order and go looking for similar evils elsewhere.

Only the people themselves can bring real change. It is the people themselves who must overthrow the tabloids by finally rejecting them and emerging from that oppressive order. It is unthinkable that Leveson would shut them down, and it would be an ineffective gesture if he did. But it is not inconceivable that the people could shut it down by not buying it anymore, and if it happened that way then there would be no market left for any other such crud. It happened to the News of the World and it didn’t take long.

3. The Leveson enquiry does create a moment of possibility… a moment of clarity when an antagonism can, and must be awoken between the sheep and their crooked shepherds. This is the moment to ask the question to the working men and women of the UK: Do you think the Sun cares about you at all?

It is time for the gospel of Revelation, of radical non-participation in the empire’s oppressions: “come out of her, O my people.” We can overthrow it by not buying it.

WHY DO WALER WANT TO DESTROY THEIR LAST ALBUM?

My favourite album of last year was Formulas by Waler. In fact it’s become one of my favourite albums of all time. I can’t say enough good about it.

It strikes me as being a somewhat feminist album, which they say was not intended particularly. It also strikes me as being a revolutionary tract of sorts, being shot through with the sense of being a people, and being openly critical of formulaic individualism, and being conscious of the absurd power that entertainment industries and the media have to define the meanings of ordinary people’s lives. It also strikes me as being a spiritually conscious album.

It’s totally concise. There’s no flab on it at all. It works between camp Italo Disco and early 90’s dance music in an ironically formulaic fashion. I believe they believe every lyric on there. It is the sound of total conviction.

So, we loved that they asked to release it through our small indie label/collective Zang Productions. Well, mostly. Some Zangers said they didn’t get it at all. Perhaps another sign of a great album?

Then, not too long after the release they, Vince and John, phoned me to ask if they could burn all the stock. That’s what they want to do. All hard copies of the album to be burned. Having a certain connection with things apocalyptic, I felt quite good about the idea right away. But still, there needs to be a reason, doesn’t there… What’s the reason? On this subject it’s hard to get a straight answer.

* * *

Even by Zang’s standards the album has been a big flop since it was released in 2010. We wanted to get it ready for a gig where they were following Bob Dylan (that never quite materialised). We got wowed by the big names and we rushed it. Besides that, Waler got so disillusioned with the gig scene that they pretty much gave up playing live, and that doesn’t help you break even. Is that part of it? The nasty scenario of having a load of boxes of unsellable CDs by the sofa, calling you a loser every time you walk by.

Since the Zang collective pools its money to support whatever projects arise within the family, the whole stock burning idea is quite controversial. Right now, Waler are £300 under, which seems like a lot to burn when you’re small-timers. They might be impeding the prospects of the next release. Zang happily cuts losses where a project doesn’t break even, but when a band wants to burn all the stock for artistic reasons…? It’s a question.

* * *

* * *

They’re not merely disillusioned with the album. They both completely love it, actually. This gesture has the air of a philosophical proposition of some kind. A piece of performance art… a prophetic statement… It smells like frustration at the impotence of the music scene; the subjugation of music to mass culture’s narratives and to its saleable mediums. Music should really be a mode of expression through which ordinary people can speak loudly into their culture, to challenge and change it, and to beautify it. Vital music has to exist independently of mass culture’s dull and controlling momentum and its stifling monopoly on its mediums. The idea of burning that dream of fame which involves disseminating your product into the households of ordinary people… I like that.

* * *

A lot of people see it as a commentary on the changing landscape of music mediums. This is the age of the mp3. Hard copies are now a slightly archaic thing, and bands wanting to emulate the mediated dreams of touring and selling their CDs are getting disappointed these days. A bizarre statement. Is it a respectful requiem for the CD, which has been usurped by progress? Or is it a sort of shrewd cull of a useless old medium?

I got this email from Vince a while ago…

Dear Guys,

If the medium is the message, then the message of the mp3 format must surely be “none of this really matters.” For a song to be compressed into this format, it must be emptied of its drive, emotion and spirit, in fact, its meaning. In this context, Black Sabbath sits alongside Kylie Minogue and says much the same thing.  Public Enemy means the same as Rick Astley.  It is not just our musical heroes who have been fed through the formulaic meat-grinder, but the music itself.  I think it’s what Kierkegaard called levelling.  It’s the eradication of distinctions between high and low art, underground and mainstream, popular and niche.

If we want our work to have any impact, is it the best format to be using?

Obviously for a band who have just decided to burn all their CDs, this is a slightly worrying thought. Did we attack the wrong medium?

We would do well to bear in mind Neil Postman’s assertion that each new technology is a Faustian pact. It gives us something, but it also takes something away. If mp3 takes away both the meaning and value of music, is it something we should surrender willingly?

Do you agree, or have any thoughts to add?

Yours,

Vince (Waler)

This got me thinking about mp3s. What Vince said rang true to me: this medium says that none of the songs really matter – they’re just nice. But why does it say that? I thought three thoughts. First, that the mp3 is historically associated with the private listening device – the iPod. Second, that mp3s are bought online, probably on your private computer in your home. Third, as John had pointed out, you can’t lend someone your favourite albums on mp3 – it defies lending or sharing. It even defies looking into the face of a shop assistant or having to leave the house. And it’s born of a culture of personal or private listening, not communal. It has a segregating force that takes music away from being the radically empowering and unifying, and communally beautifying form that it might be. Listening to Public Enemy for personal amusement is ok, but I think they had bigger designs than that in mind.

In a way it looked like a bit of a blow for the argument for burning the CDs, but at least the argument was going some interesting places.

* * *

I watched the documentary on YouTube about the KLF burning £1 million in cash, and nobody really cared or took any notice. If people didn’t care about that, why should anyone care about a completely unknown band burning £300 worth of their CDs? It is comedic! An unknown band wants to burn £300 worth of their own album, which almost nobody has even heard, and the £300 didn’t even come from them – so it’s not even costing them anything.

* * *

Sometimes the whole idea feels dark and nihilistic and depressing to me. I think John and Vince also feel that way sometimes. An attention seeking gesture of despair… destruction just for the hell of it. But sometimes it does seem to make sense – like they want to make a toxic stench so unbearable that the local scene has to wake up from its sleep walk of emulating mass culture.

I’m not sure where this is going. It’s an interesting question.

MARCH ACTION

THERE WERE TWO STREET WARDENS across the road, regarding us for a little while. They decided to come over to take a look and ask us what we were doing.

We were playing our songs.

“Why” they asked?

That’s quite a big question. We said that we were responding to the billboard.

“Are you for it, or against it?”

“I think we’re against.”

“And why is that?”

“We resent the power that some have to spoon-feed the people an endless and oppressive juxtaposition of men in clothes and women in underwear in the name of profit.” I may not have said that exactly, but it was something eloquent to that effect.

“What’s wrong with wearing underwear?”

We both knew that was an absurd question. I said that I was wearing underwear, but our point was that women are generically represented to us all in a particular way, and that it isn’t so often that you see a man represented in public space all sweaty and pert in his underwear.

Then warden number two pitched in, pointing to a giant empty billboard across the street. He said that until recently there had been just such a picture of a man in boxer shorts. He specified; “it wasn’t sweaty, but it was pert.”

It was the way that he said that…

It was like he was a policeman saying something like “listen son, three people died in traffic accidents on this road last year…” eyeing us with gravely serious brows over imaginary spectacles, lips pursed and watching for the weight of his words to kick in…

But what he said was, “It wasn’t sweaty, but it was pert.”

We didn’t really know what to say to that, so, since they didn’t mind, we kept on playing.

TV Head

A HANDFUL OF US took it in turns to wear the TV head, standing there before the giant screen that now hangs in Birmingham city centre on New St, right outside the Bullring. We made a silent and passive image; an interlocked non-dialogue between screen and being, between transmitter and receiver, between industry and humanity.

* * *

QUESTIONING MEDIATION GETS HARDER AND HARDER as time goes on, because as time goes on it becomes harder and harder to imagine anything apart from it. Other places and other worlds are known almost exclusively through the screen, and even in our own spheres it is through the screen that we navigate half our waking lives. When something exciting happens before our very eyes, half of us will still stand there beholding the scene through the tiny screens of our phones, absorbing the spectacle into that other realm. The screen has become a higher reality, a celestial sphere, the realm of higher powers. Its two-dimensional representations of things are more important to us than the things themselves.

A parallel example: the Roman imperial cult. It’s thought unlikely that the imperial cult came about in any conspiratorial way. Nothing romantic or fantastic like that, it just developed. But it did become a pivotal structure for organising and unifying a huge and disparate empire. It came with a dream of freedom and individual expression: under Rome a people could freely practice whatever their religion may be, but they were also required to include the deities of the imperial cult in their worship, notably the emperor himself. This is how the image and the authority of the emperor were mediated to all the peoples of his empire. His image was projected in their presence and a sense of his power was evoked. This religious mediation organised the people of the empire in obedience and preserved the power of the mediators.

So, our spectacle was to present mediation as religion and religion as mediation. The realm of mediation is inflated with its patronising zeal for Western rationality, and for man’s conquest over superstition and religion. Meanwhile it has become the most incredible expression of organised religion the world has ever seen. It gives the people direction and meaning by inspiring them with dreams of a better world. It unifies the people in a common “morality”, a common sense of identity and purpose, and a common rhetoric and belief system. It presents the people with deities against which to reckon themselves. It unifies the empire and it controls it by the constant assertion of itself. Guy Debord says this:

The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.[i]

It pacifies, numbs and amuses. If religion is the opiate of the masses, then mass mediation is religion.[ii]

* * *

HOW DO YOU MAKE A TV HEAD? It’s very difficult. It’s also very hazardous in a few ways. The plastic hull of your classical old-school television contains a few circuit boards and such, but mostly it’s just full of a giant bubble of very thick glass. Inside the giant bubble is, a) some dangerous chemicals of some kind, and b) a pressure vacuum which commands six tons of force onto itself or something awful like that. This is why old TVs have their own special destination at the dump. Like fridges, they’re hazardous waste.

And then, when you take a hammer to the back end of it (wearing goggles and a helmet and oven gloves and whatever else you can find, and also having covered the TV in layers of blankets – all to protect yourself from the force of the implosion)… when you take a hammer to the back of it, there is a good 50% chance that the glass will crack all the way round to the screen. You don’t want that, because you want the screen to stay intact. If the screen does stay intact then you have hours of hacking away the excess glass and sanding the evil teeth down and then covering the sharp rim with bathroom sealant. There’s glass shards and glass dust everywhere. It’s horrible. And don’t forget about all the poisonous chemicals inside it. You have to wash it out really well. Maybe we should’ve worn face masks for that part. I’m sure I’m taking a month off my life every time I try to make one of these.

Then you need to put some rocks in the back part of the television to counter the surprising weight of the screen. You seal those in with some expanding foam stuff, and you wedge into the foam a bicycle helmet with a chunk sawn off the top.

Finally, when it’s ready, you’ll find its bad for a bad back, and I can’t imagine the terrible mess if you fell over in it with the big glass screen in front of your face.

So be careful. Don’t get hurt.

* * *

OUR SPECTACLE WOULD HAVE BEEN a pitiful and despairing gesture against the almighty power of the screen, like attacking a mountain with a hammer or drinking the sea… is there any point? We pity those kinds of people, who pick hopeless battles and are doomed to a lifetime of unbearable whining. We suspect that their anger at such things is probably just a facade, hiding some petty personal bitterness.

As is our custom we were not addressing the screen but the people. The screen’s ultimate power is not change, but the opposite. It pacifies. For change we appeal to the people, especially since it is ourselves as people that must change first. Any change besides that is superficial. Our spectacle exists to challenge a way of thinking (or a way of not thinking), and the mediated religion exists to propagate that way of thinking: that we believe we are rational, because we were told so from a realm of illusion… that we believe that we have outgrown the religious, because we were told so by the our religion… that we believe we have superseded God because of our irrational belief that God would obediently reside wholly within the discipline of religion, and because of our hypocritical belief that we are too wise for religion.

Our spectacle was to stir doubt and to propose a certain heresy. We presented nothing that wasn’t already somewhere in everybody’s minds. Our heresy is humility; the audacious admission that our beliefs came not from enquiry, but from a drip.

* * *

BULLRING SECURITY moved us away. They can do that because they own the area around where the brass bull stands, so it meant moving to other side of some bollards about ten yards away. Ten yards didn’t make any difference to us, we didn’t mind, but the question is what was on their mind? What difference did it make to them? Do they have a blanket policy against any kind of open expression by the public? Was there something about this particular spectacle that was threatening to them? What were they afraid of?

The police on the other hand (and there were a lot of police because of an anti-cuts protest nearby) were quite the opposite. They came and said hello and said we should just ask them if we needed anything. It was a similar story at the January action. The police were quite happy about it and the private security of the retailers were not.

Most people stopped, looked, laughed, made shocked and giddy exclamations, took photos. People were constantly asking us directly, what did it mean? So we asked them what it meant to them. The worst answer was, “you’re advertising television?” The best was, “you’re saying we’re all TV heads…”

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[i] From Society of the Spectacle. The word ‘spectacle’ is used in this book to refer to the realm of mediation. Confusingly, I’m in the habit of using that word to refer to our public actions. Guy Debord was involved in the subversive political arts movement Situationist International, who have been influential on ABH thought.

[ii] Religion is the opiate of the masses… however, we are now warned against the monotheistic religions not because they pacify the masses, but because (we are told) they will radicalise them. Pacification of the masses is the current ideal to be preserved.

The Table of Western Gender Politics

OUR AIM WAS TO CREATE A SPECTACLE on Union St in Birmingham city centre, critiquing some advertising images in the shop displays. There would singing, dancing, testy sandwich boards and some doomsday howling. The lady selling flowers just down the way wasn’t pleased, even though we explained ourselves to her, bought flowers from her and even threw in an improvised song about buying flowers for people you love. That aside, a lot of people were very into it. There were voices of agreement speaking up, there were knowing looks from mothers with children, and there was a lot of standing and watching and nodding and holding up mobile phones to capture the situation. People joined the band, danced, did solos even, while security watched from a distance gripping their walkie-talkies.

* * *

THE TABLE OF WESTERN GENDER POLITICS poses the idea that our personal relationships are defined by economic relationships. Ideals of manhood and womanhood come, not from ourselves or from dialogue with each other, or from philosophy, antiquity, education or revelation… but from a very simple formula mediated to us by money making businesses: media, advertising, retailers etc.

The structure is so all-pervading and so tactlessly crude that, as we staged our critique outside BHS and M&S, it felt like we were pointing at the sky. Mass culture speaks its word over us: womankind is perpetually cast in the image of the sexualised product, and all western women must live under the omnipresent force of that dehumanising image. Meanwhile, often by mere inference, mankind must manifest the gaze of the beholder, the consumer and the insatiable sexual appetite.^[i]

This is the faith in which we raise our children.

In the BHS images, for example, The man is dressed and ready to seize the day. The woman is undressed and ready to be seized. The man is stood up proud and active. The woman is laid down and passive. The man’s eyes look directly forward to go forth and possess. The woman’s eyes look sheepishly to the side, away from the gaze that possessively beholds her.

The structure is a one way conversation. There’s no apparent way to dialogue with it. It presumes to speak for us and to make claims of us and about us, but it’s not our culture. It’s presumptuously imposed upon us by those who’s concern is not the well being of the people, but only profit. We, the people, are a means to their ends.

The structure subdues, pacifies and controls the people. It cultivates the economy’s cardinal virtues of self interested fear and possessive desire. Meanwhile the people are left to live their lives saturated by this dehumanising and alienating ideal.

* * *

THIS ISN’T ABOUT CENSORSHIP. The images that were subject to our spectacle were not “shocking” or “explicit”. We have no particular notion that these images are more or less suitable for young or old people. Historically, right wing concerns about mediation have taken issue with particular images or films, or what have you, for being “too racy” or “too explicit” to be displayed in such a place or at such a time. We do not take issue with particular sensationalised scandals within the system, but with the ordinary functioning of the system itself. We take issue with the endless repetition of a commodified, self interested and oppressive ideal of gender and sexuality, imposed by unelected masters. Neither image is particularly problematic in itself; it is the juxtaposition of the two, the relationship, or even the disparity between them, and the repetition of those ideals: the man and the woman… the consumer and the product…

* * *

NOR WAS IT A PROTEST. We weren’t there to address BHS or M&S, or to make a public spectacle of them. We were making a spectacle of a pervasive structure and we were addressing the people. BHS are not the makers of that structure, they just passively regurgitate it as a trusted formula. They have no power to challenge it, nor do M&S. They observe the structure in obedience to their god of profit. And even if every retailer in Birmingham stopped spoon feeding us these oppressive identities, and gave us something else instead, the change would be superficial. We, the people, would still be as passive and lost as before, with no culture of our own – only what is given.

We’re doing something else. We would rather see our people awakened and conscious of their oppression. We would rather, as a people, begin to refuse the illusion of culture that’s thrust on us by industries. We want to begin to engage creatively with the world and with each other, in order to create a culture of our own – something that has been hard to find in the formless void of mass culture too long.^[ii]

Therefore, we have little faith in the power of big businesses to effect lasting change for the people.

St. Augustine said that the city of oppressors is too weak to escape its own greed: “…a city which aims at dominion, which holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination.”^[iii] God’s grace, on the other hand, is with the oppressed, the weak and the down trodden, so that even the city of oppressors may in some way be liberated from its own greed. Paulo Freire said this:

“This is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit and rape by virtue of their power, cannot find within this power the strength to liberate either the oppressed, or themselves. Only the power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.”^[iv]

It is the people then, who must impose lasting change upon big businesses. Not the other way around. The meek inherit the earth.

Protest is purely secondary and incidental. Our spectacle is to the people first and foremost. It’s not protest, it’s prophetic action.

* * *

SOME PEOPLE TOOK ISSUE WITH THE ACTION because, they said, the woman outside M&S (and BHS) is not a whore – she’s just a model earning a living. For that matter, it would also be ridiculous of us to accuse the man of being a pervert.^[v]

What those people said reveals the depth of the illusion, in a sense, because there was actually no woman there to speak of, only a big piece of paper with ink on it. We see a woman where there is only an image, and we’re often not conscious of the ideals that the image imposes on us, or whose interests the ideals serve.^[vi]

The purpose of our action was to publicly critique the identities that images (and their non-visible puppet masters) impose. We weren’t calling anyone a whore. We were concerned, not with labelling the image, but with how the image labels us.

I felt very sorry about the people who were upset though. Just one person really. Either she didn’t get it (despite explanations) or perhaps the sexualised identity of women was actually very precious to her. If you’re raised to believe that your only real power and status lies in your sexiness, and then you’re asked to entertain the thought that those ideals were just exploitation for profit… what do you have left?  There’s a lot to lose.

* * *

THE NEXT WORKING DAY we were surprised to see that M&S had removed the image of the woman. We were so busy with the idea of ordinary people gate-crashing the one-way conversation of public space that it hadn’t occurred to us that the powers might also listen in. By the end of the week they’d taken the corresponding man’s image down too, probably because it looked lop-sided. Only at that point did I notice, the Table of Western Gender Politics remains perfectly stated by an army of plastic hearted mannequins.

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Notes

^[i] Because of its immediate sensory power we made sex an allegory for every product that could be advertised, and now, finally, it seems to us that every product is merely an allegory for sex.

^[ii] Perhaps genuine culture can now only exist in exile – in defiant otherness to the imperialistic momentum of mass culture?

^[iii] From City of God

^[iv] From Pedagogy of the Oppressed

^[v] Nobody said anything about that though, because nobody really perceived the picture of the man. True to the formula the man is not to be perceived – the man is the perceiver. It is womankind who must constantly bear the burden of being watched and judged. Feminist thinkers call it the patriarchal gaze.

^[vi] In fact things have been turned quite upside-down. What happens on posters and screens is all unreal, in that it is merely the replication of real things onto a 2-dimensional space. However, it has become a pillar of the faith that the screen is the realm of realisation. She who makes it into the screen is thought to have been realised, vindicated, humanised even. The realm of illusion has become more real to us than reality.