GO TO HELL BASTARD—STOP—REFUSE PRIZE—STOP—NEVER ASKED FOR IT—STOP—AGAINST ALL DECENCY MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY—STOP—I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME – Asger Jorn.
The Wages of Tate’s Exchange Value:
On the 24th Thermidor CCXXVII* certain individuals tenuously linked to three-sided football are set to sell out their sometime revolutionary passtime in exchange for the apparent compensation of an afternoon spent ‘exploring the relationship between art, football and identity’. They will do so at that marketplace of cultural imperialism, Tate Modern, London. Paltry wages, but valuable cultural capital, no doubt! For the “first time ever”, three-sided football will echo approvingly around the hallowed halls of this art world powerhouse, squeezed into an artistic straightjacket and served up steaming; one more easily digestible morsel for gluttons of the global culture industry.
So fixated are these alleged ‘three-sided footballers’ in their mission to finally tame the triple-headed beast however, they appear to have overlooked one important fact: their pitiful efforts simply amount to the historical re-enactment of an event that has already taken place, an event that was itself already only a repetition of its own non-existence! We refer, of course, to the by now infamous three-sided ‘Exorcism of Serious Culture and White Supremacy’, held unannounced and uninvited on Thursday 24th March, 8PC [2016 vulg.] at Tate Modern, London.
During that unsolicited zone of proletarian development, the assembled psychic workers managed to successfully stall Tate Modern’s security, via a process of continual deferral up the institution’s dizzying chain of command, long enough for a fifteen-minute game of three-sided football to take place, in the meantime. Eventually the players were ejected, with the insistence that they must email to request permission for such activities. The following day they obligingly emailed Tate for a permit; asked when they might like to play, they simply responded ‘yesterday’. In this sense the game of three-sided football has already unfolded, across several dimensions at once, within, against and beyond the very bureaucratic apparatus that Tate uses to enforce its role in the psychic reproduction of capitalist imperialism.
Given this, it is hardly surprising that the forthcoming imitation of this non-event has clearly been scheduled to avoid the inevitable pickets and sabotage that would have inevitably unfolded, had this witless restaging not been precisely timed to coincide with the long predestined psychic workers pilgrimage, from the later-day birthplace of Letterism (Botosani, Romania) to the former-day deathplace of Letterism (Alinja, Azebaijan).
At first it seems as if Tate could have picked this date at random, that is if one is willing to grant that the evocation of Thermidor is purely accidental, given its status as a byword for reactionary recapitulation! However, when one realises the truth, it becomes clear that their selection was even more brazen! In fact, it appears likely that the date was chosen due to an incompetent conversion between the Republican and Gregorian Calendars, probably conducted by these artist-footballers’ American handlers. Accidentally using the US system, which places month before day, one would be left with ‘8/11/2019’. Mistakenly entering this – 8th of November, 2019 – into a simple date conversion calculator would thus deliver a Republican Calendar date for this act of historical repetition of none other than the 18th Brumaire! They mock us with their arrogance, in equal measure their incompetence!
This naked and underhanded attempt by Tate and their spineless accomplices to avoid the crucial political scrutiny their recuperative mission demands, whilst at the same time mocking those who might challenge them, can only be taken for the act of craven cowardice it so plainly is. Those who would hide behind moving goalposts would do well to examine their history; sooner or later, it will catch up with them!
What follows is a critique of this whole sordid affair, as penned by Strategic Optimism Football, in July, 12PC. It calls upon all psychic workers who are able, and not otherwise engaged in pilgrimage-related activities, to descend upon Tate, and to use their picket of these shame-faced shenanigans to open yet one more wormhole in the creaking and increasingly threadbare façade of capitalist culture!
1th as Tragedy, 1th as Farce
Asger Jorn remarked somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, three times. He did not, however, forget to add that they do so, not sequentially, but simultaneously: the 1th time, as the 1th time, as the 1th – with any subsequent numerology betraying a tragic, and indeed farcical inability to count! Yet now, ‘Cultural Capitalisers’ are piled upon ‘Psychic Workers’; explorations of ‘the relationship between art, football and identity’ drown out the ‘Triolectical Exorcism of Serious Culture and White Supremacy’; the three-sided jail cell of 12PC [2019 vulg.] replaces the triolectical emancipation of 8PC [2016 vulg.]. This is the caricature that occurs now, in the latest edition of Sir Henry Tate’s footballing forays.
Destructive Workers and Productive Workers may well make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, nurtured by Reproductive Workers and cultured by Psychic Workers. The labour of all Living and Dead Workers uplifts the dreams of the Living and the reveries of the Dead. And just as the Destructive and Productive Workers seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, imagining themselves to be creating something that did not exist before, ex nihilo, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they are forced to turn back to the ‘revolutionary animism’ they might otherwise deny, anxiously conjuring up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this ‘new’ scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.
Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, every four years England’s footballers cloak themselves in the mantels of 1966 – and 1918, and 1945 -; the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire; the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into their mother tongue, but they assimilate the spirit of the new language and expresses themselves freely in it only when they move it into superposition with the old. They do not forget their native tongue, rather translations and transliterations open new, superpositional timelines. The Hurufis teach that all language stems from a metalanguage of existence and that the pansemic letters of this langauge, once pronounced, can be read by any in possession of this knowledge, in, for and beyond a given tongue. What they omitted to add is that this is what is generally referred to as ‘common sense’, in other words, immanent world community.
When we think about this conjuring up of the dead in art history, a salient difference reveals itself. In 8PC those workers whose psychic strike attempted to exorcise the Tate’s cathedral – built and reproduced on slave wealth and wage slavery – performed the task of their time, preceding times and times to come: the task of reaching across time towards the living and dead critique of modern bourgeois society. To exorcise the Tate of its imperialist spirit, its ghosts need to be exercised. In reproductive resurrections of Neoist costumes, themselves replete with a psychic necromancy of Situtionist and Fluxus phrases, these psychic workers echoed the battle cries of Dada and Surrealism. They were the joke upon the serious farce of an avant-garde tragedy, exorcising the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ by resurrecting the living and dancing with the dead.
The first avant-gardes had destroyed art’s feudal foundation and cut off the feudal heads that had grown on it. At the same time, they created inside the Art World the only conditions under which free competition could be developed, parcelled-out patronage properly used, and the unfettered productive power of the ‘Cultural Industries’ employed; and beyond the Art World this helped sweep away feudal institutions everywhere, to provide, as far as necessary, bourgeois society with an appropriately up-to-date environment through which to reproduce itself. Once the new social formation was established, the antediluvian colossi disappeared and with them also the resurrected Avant-Gardism– the Situationists and Fluxus, Isidore Isou himself. Bourgeois society in its sober reality bred its own true interpreters and spokesmen, from the former Milbank Prison, to the auction houses of the super-rich; its real military leaders sat behind the office desk and hog-headed Mr Moneybags was its political chief. Entirely absorbed in the production of wealth and in peaceful competitive struggle, it no longer remembered that the ghosts of the Avant-Garde had watched over its cradle.
‘Hero-worshiping’ though bourgeois art is, it naturally needed anti-heros – Dada, Surrealism, Situationists, Fluxus – to bring itself into being. And in the austere classical traditions of the Avant-Garde, the bourgeois gladiators found the ideals and the forms, the self-deceptions, that they needed to conceal from themselves the bourgeois-limited content of their struggles and to keep their passion on the high plane of great historic tragedy. Similarly, at another stage of development a few centuries earlier, Cromwell and the English people had borrowed from the Old Testament the speech, emotions, and illusions for their bourgeois revolution. When the real goal had been achieved and the bourgeois transformation of English society had been accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.
Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles by parodying the old; of magnifying the real task in the imagination, by manifesting its non-existence in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, by making its ghosts walk again. The Psychic Workers’ exorcism of Henry Tate’s temple of Serious Culture was thus not the only time the ghosts of the ancestors have joined the living in struggle, however, this time the struggle was to be conducted from a position of solidarity, not instrumentalisation: the Dead and the Living workers united against the dead-life of capital, that would frieze our living and dead labours into its own cruel circuit of suspended animation. If it denies us our birth-rites to truly live, does it not simultaneously deny us our death-rites to truly die? Living and Dead workers, of this world and the next, unite! You have nothing to lose but your graves!
In 12 PC, however, these ancestral ghosts of the old revolution have been sent packing. Repackaged up into the commodity prisons they are condemned to haunt, they confront us as the dead labour of serious culture, forever recycled in the undeath spiral of capital’s accelerating dans macabre. Three-sided footballers, so long as they were engaged in fixed rotations, that is to say the bourgeois specialisation of sport, have not been able get rid of the memory of that other reproductive specialisation, art, as the proposed events at Tate prove. They long to return from the perils of revolution to the fleshpots of the football pitch and the holy halls of culture. The valuable marketplace of ‘Tate Exchange’, on 24th Thermidor, is their answer. Now they have not only a caricature of sport and art, but sport and art themselves, caricatured as they would have to be in the year 12PC [2019 vulg].
As psychic workers, we want the new in so far as it is old; that is its removal from Capital’s ceaseless overthrow of all existing conditions. Permanent Revolution is what it is – and, being permanently impermanent, also what it is not – precisely because to revolve means to turn on the spot. This is the true definition of a geometrical point, which so escaped Euclid, but which was perceptively revealed by Jorn’s Situlogical investigations. Backwards and forwards are relative concepts; they only exist, as Jorn noted, relative to a point of view. Clockwise refers only to the cycle of the sun, but the heliocentric revolution of the Hermeticists needs to now be decentred, not least for its Eurocentric and Transcendental preoccupations. If time is entropy, then it can only be observed from the neg-entropic viewpoint of a living organism, that’s the point, which is to say, it must also be dialectical. Further, since entropic time simply describes a relationship, and not a thing in itself, it can only exist relative to something, in this case the neg-entropic observer, itself only a constellation of its relations, in time. As such, time is simply a triolectical fact of life, as much as life is a temporal fact, but history is also a product of matter, as much as matter is a product of history, which actually matters, when discussing history, indeed her-story, their-story, or stories in general – of which very little can be said, if they even exist.
The social revolution of the 1th Century cannot take its games simply from the present, but also from the future and the past, simultaneously. It cannot end with itself before it has made a new superposition of all the superstitions of the past. Former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to animate their own content. The revolution of the 1th Century will see the self-emancipation of the dead from burying themselves, in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content is letterist, it is itself the phrase.
Society now needs to retreat to behind its starting point; in truth, it has first to reproduce from itself the revolutionary point of departure – the situation, the relations, the conditions under which alone all past revolution becomes farcical. Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the avant-garde, storm more swiftly from success to success, their dramatic effects outdo each other, men and things seem set in sparkling diamonds, ecstasy is the order of the day – but they are short-lived, soon they have reached their zenith, and a long hangover takes hold of society before it learns to assimilate the results of its stormy period soberly.
On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, of all centuries, constantly criticise themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they superpose the cumulative the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their obstacles only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite and triplicate nature of their goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves call out: Here is the field, here play!
– Strategic Optimism Football, 13 Messidor CCXXVII
* That is to say 9th Dhu al-Hijjah, 1440, in the Islamic Caldendar, the 11th August, 2019, in the Imperial Calendar, or year 12 of the Proletarian Calendar.
Strategic Optimism Football 