The
principal
interests of Chaos Marxism are
revolutionary politics, psychology and culture – and the place
where, like the fundamental forces of nature, they are revealed to be
a unity under situations of high pressure. It has been increasingly
gratifying to discover, over the last year or two, that –
particularly in Britain – we are not alone in these concerns.
Making contact with the Materialist Esthetix current was a decisive
point in our evolution; another was being sent the first two editions
of the Newhaven Journeyman,
a journal under the capable editorship of Alastair Kemp at Eleusinian Press.
The
Journeyman subtitles
itself “a haven for dilettantes”. Dilettante
comes from Italian and literally means “someone who delights” -
that is, someone who takes delight, pleasure, jouissance
in a field of endeavour. In original Italian, it has the same meaning
as the French amateur
- “someone who loves”. (Italian football's highest amateur league
is Serie D, for dilettantes.) And both these words have taken on the
secondary connotation of the opposite of “professional” - not
only in the sense of “doing it for money, rather than love”, but,
sadly, as in “not up to the highest standards of craft; shoddy;
half-baked”.
Professionalisation,
of course, was originally a step forward for working people. The
history of organised sport began with a struggle between, to use
old-fashioned sexist cricketing terminology, “Gentlemen” and
“Players” - i.e. between the ruling class who had no day jobs and
could therefore take time off whenever they felt like it to train and
play, and working people who needed to be paid to bring themselves up
to the “Gentlemen”'s level. Similar things happened in the world
of music and other artforms, when the old-school patronage model
(where, as Frank Zappa put it, “the duke said, I'll chop your
fingers off if it doesn't sound like this”)
was replaced with the freedom to sell one's creative efforts in the
market place.
As
good communists, we of course recognise that the negation of
amateurism by professionalism was a triumph of the bourgeois
revolution over feudalism; and yet, perhaps it is time for that
negation to be negated once again. Professionalism in sports, the
arts, academia and
music has led to a hypostatisation of all the worst elements of the
“celebrity cult” - hyperspecialisation means that our performers
have become untouchable, unreachable, iconic, inhuman, and
their increasingly superlative performances have ceased to bear
anything but a vague family resemblance to anything that ordinary
people might do for fun. In
my own country, a recent series of newspaper articles have explored
the hitherto-hushed story of mental health issues among elite
sportsmen. Meanwhile, we all know from a million rock biographies and
artist documentaries that success in the cultural market economy can
screw our creative heroes up far worse than failure.
Karl
Marx predicted that the communist future would mean a kind of “return
to amateurism”, a reversal of the inhuman hyperspecialisation in
the division of labour encouraged by the unfettered commodity economy
- where
“nobody has one exclusive
sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he
wishes” (The
German Ideology). In
the spirit of the Hegelian dialectic, this would mean that the
dilettante – she who does things for fun, for passion, for
use-value – has become more useful than the full-time professional,
paid a good living to concentrate on a vanishingly small area of
human endeavour.
The
academy, in the current vogueishness of “interdisciplinary
studies”, has finally begun to catch up to this. But by that it
means teams of hyperspecialists. Woe betide any generalist – or
even someone who wants to start
in an interdisciplinary fashion – getting such a position. Combined
with the “bums on seats” model of tertiary education, where
pushing people up the ladder to dissertation becomes an end in
itself, and you get what I like to call the lumpen-intelligensia
– the “reserve army of philosophy and art”, people with all the
verbal, creative and cognitive skills necessary to make real steps
forward in combining theory into practice in creating new
stuff which means something, and
yet not able to use those skills in the market economy. So many of us
end up earning a crust by proofreading, grammar-checking or indexing
the works of those good enough at, to use another Zappaism, “politics
or blow-jobs” to have landed one of the jobs that the rest of us
were trained for.
Where
was I? Oh yes. So in one sense the whole Internet/blogosphere can be
seen as a “haven for dilettantes”. But the flip side of open
access is zero quality control – except in the sense that
“click-baiting”, sensationalism or pandering to prejudice for an
audience, creates its own superstars. Surely the future of a
communist logosphere must be in collective
quality control. It's the difference between “private publishing”
and “vanity publishing” - you can put your stuff out completely
freely, screw the market economy and the institutions, etc, etc...
but if you're not part of a collective or a community which can help
you spellcheck your work, give it a wash and shave its armpits, or
even in extreme cases to tell you that you've just wasted
your time... I don't fancy your
chances of producing something great. You need a grindstone to whet
your sword of burnished gold against.
And
herein is the genius of the Newhaven Journeyman
– it comes out in the format of a small booklet, of similar size
and shape to institutionally-backed journals, and – one assumes! -
has an editorial agenda of quality control. And yet the content is a
metric fuckton more interesting than anything you'll find in a “real”
journal, because it comes from the intersection of theory
and practice. This ain't a bunch
of psychs reading off the results of randomised controlled trials of
the new Blahdeblahdezine tablet in making crazies sit down and shut
up, no sir. When – in Issue One (2012) you read Jan Tchamani
talking about her experiences of syanesthesia when the outside world
becomes literally too painful to step into, or Andrew Roberts' deeply
sad exploration of the life of poetess Charlotte Mew, who lived a
lonely life for fear of any progeny falling prey to the “lunacy”
which had led to her sister and brother being locked up – this is
real stuff. This is
what being “differently sane” to use the Church of the
SubGenius's terminology feels like on the inside. It's a cage made of
bars no-one else can see. This is radical subjectivity, the subaltern
telling Gayatri Spivak to get lost and doing its damndest to speak.
Or – in the case of Kim
Withnail's “Two Women” - when it's gone too far down to speak,
you'd better hope you have an artist/therapist/activist with a hell
of a lot of compassion handy to at least transmit a glimmer of what's
really happening to those on the outside.
The
subaltern, as I think Aleister Crowley might have recognized, can
only speak from a place of “darkness”, that is, from the “blind
spot” of the All-Seeing Eye of official consciousness. This is the
place of Freud's “uncanny”, or Robert Graves' “objective
poetry” which is the same thing as the most ancient voodoo magick
chants in that you can tell “the presence of the Gods” (or Muses,
or the Juice) by the
hairs on the back of your neck bristling. So we have experiements in
weird fiction which are deeply unsettling. I must say that I didn't
enjoy either Thomas
DeAngelo's “The Scientist” or Liz Aidl's “Beneath” from Issue
Two (2013). But that's because I recognized where they came from. The
first is
a morality of tale
research into radical
subjectivity gone too far,
while the other explores the masochistic complicity of the partner of
a Dixie version of Josef Fritzl. I
don't like those places where
the writers delved, because
I've been close to them and barely got out again with my ego intact.
Which is precisely the kind of thing that “objective art” reminds
us of. You're not suppose
to like the “real stuff”.
Hold
on, I almost forgot myself. Talking about “whetting the
grindstone”, and I was about to finish this review without any
criticism? Well... I must say I wasn't too impressed with Tristan
Vivian Adam's “Talking with Cries”, which read to me a bit like
“cargo cult academia” - aping the obscurantist langage
of our social betters to come to a conclusion which might have worked
much better as a one-page poem. Daniel Spicer's cut-up was very
interesting for the first few iterations, not so much after that. As for the work of Michael Burnett, I thought "Ghost in the Cell" was quite clever and apposite, while "Black Widow" disappointed by relying on old school misogynist tropes. And
– while I'm personally excited by the whole meme of ecosocialism –
I found his non-fiction “The Cost of Winning” a bit too
abstract, without direct connection to doing stuff in the here and
now. With regard to reconciliation ecology, Michael – a subject
which I find intriguing – what is to be done, by us, to coin a phrase?
So
– although of course I love the way Ben Watson writes and his
contributions to both issues give me real pleasure – I don't
suppose you read the Newhaven Journal
for fun, any more than you write for it for fun. To quote Rorschach,
the disturbed vigilante from Alan Moore's Watchmen
- “we do these things because we are compelled”. We write and
draw and make music because to do otherwise means having no mouth and
yet you must scream. It might
not be any good but we can never tell that in advance and we
must do it to find out if it was worth doing.
And, if we are deeply honest, we find music and art and writing and
politics which bring us face to face with the Blind Spot of our whole
culture (the exploitation of the proletarian and the oppression of
anyone who doesn't “fit), and with the Blind Spot in our own minds
which is the internalisation of the lies we have to tell others in
order to live in this $2.99 material world.
Keep
going, Alastair and your motley crew of fellow travellers.
