Hakim Bey - Manifest za povratak u 1911.

U svojem novom tekstu Hakim Bey (pravim imenom Peter Lamborn Wilson) zastupa neoluditski povratak na razinu tehnološkog razvoja iz 1911. godine i odustajanje od svega što je bilo slijedilo poslije.
Svojevoljno samoograničenje u povijesnom procesu nalik je onome što pripadnici OULIPO-a rade u književnosti (pisanje priče bez upotrebe samoglasnika "e", primjerice). Povijest je obnovljivi magijski prostor, imaginacija je moguća samo bez suvremene tehnologije. Zamislite samo "čistu magiju" pisanja na parfimiranom papiru i slanja pisama zapečaćenih crvenim voskom. Hm, da...





Back to 1911 Movement Manifesto



Reversion to 1911 would constitute a perfect first step for a 21st century neo-Luddite movement. Living in 1911 means using technology and culture only up to that point and no further, or as little as possible.
For example, you can have a player-piano and phonograph, but no radio or TV; an ice-box, but not a refrigerator; an ocean liner, but not an aeroplane, electric fans, but no air conditioner.
You dress 1911. You can have a telephone. You can even have a car, ideally an electric. Someday, someone will make replicas of the 1911 “Grandma Duck” Detroit Electric, one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.
1911 was a great year for Modernism, Expressionism, Symbolism, Rosicrucianism, anarcho- syndicalism and Individualism, vegetarian lebensreform, and Nietzschean cosmic consciousness, but it was also the last great Edwardian year, the twilight of British Empire and last decadent gilded moments of Manchu, Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, French and Ottoman monarchy; last “old days” before the hideous 20th century really got going.
The next step backward would be to join the Amish and other Old Order Anabaptists in 1907 — no telephones, no electricity at all, and no internal combustion. With this move, the battle would virtually be won. The next generation would be able to make the transition to no metal — the neo-neolithic. Arcadian pastoralism.
After that a dizzying sliding spiral back into — illiteracy. Oral/aural culture. Classless tribal anarchy. Democratic shamanism. The Gift. This would be the ultimate Luddite goal. But the first step will be back to 1911.
Those who long to live in 1911 choose that year — really any year from 1890 to 1914 would be equally OK — just because it’s safely in the middle of that long lingering last decade of the long 19th century, which was also the first heroic decade of true modern radicalism, e. g. the Wandervogl, Stirnerite anarchism, the IWW and Jim Larkin, Ascona, Sex Radicals, and Nudism, etc. And, still far removed from the future of total war and totalitarianism to come — a time of utopian revolutionary hope.
Also, it’s the age of decadence; the final year of the Manchu Dynasty; opium ten cents a bottle at any country store; the Paris of J. K. Huysmans. Gaslight. The last gasp of true agrarianism in the USA; the age of Populism, the Grange, Farmers Alliance — the last rural decade.
But there’s another reason we choose 1911 (or thereabouts) for our little Golden Age. It has to do with technology. In 1911, almost all the actual conveniences of modern technology already existed: the car, the electric bulb, the phonograph.
Now, we Luddites do not approve of cars or any of these inventions, which all subtract from the quanta of Imagination available to individuals and to the Social. But, we have to admit — they’re convenient.
In their primitive forms they’re almost likable. The only real convenience invented since then — the electric refrigerator — can be replaced by an Amish-built propane refrigerator, or, we could re-invent the ice-box. We hope some day to learn to sing again, but till then, we can accept a few hand-cranked shellac records (but no radio or TV). Computers are not in any way a part of a revived 1911, however. It’s time to wake up and smell the rot of technopathology.
The telephone easily corrodes social presence and reduces selves to disembodied “voices of the Unseen,” as the Arabs called this invention. But again the primitive version, with its party lines and snoopy local operators, had a social aspect now completely leached out of the medium. If we must be thus haunted let it be via one of these elegant sinister objects — large enough to be a real murder weapon.
Recorded music realizes a dream of pure magic, but at the same time the end and even the death of music itself. As the Muzak company understood, recorded music eventually loses its presence — and in its state of absence or deprivation it becomes a potent subliminal form of anxiety, often alleviated by a shopping spree or food binge — perfect Capitalist behavior.
Thus music becomes background; in expensive restaurants one is expected to listen (but not pay attention) to music appropriate to a honkytonk whorehouse: rock’n’roll, which should be a highly presential dionysiac experience becomes aural vanilla for jaded yuppies. Youth buys its latent rebellion from the world of commercial greed and adult condescension called the Music Industry.
With headphones and computers, everyone composes a soundtrack for their own stupid boring movie, their life as student or wage slave and consumer — music as anodyne for the constant immiseration (as the Situationists used to say) of Too-Late Kapitalismo.
Finally, recording replaces our own voices with dumbness. We let stars sing for us. We let machines come between us and the divine musician within us. Music attains Spectral status. It haunts us with its own non-presence reduced to residual noise pollution.
There is next to no amateur communal music anymore (recording killed it), no “music bees,” so to speak. Music now lacks all sociality except the ersatz of mass consumption at a concert or music festival, but at least it remains possible to hear live music sometimes. Usually, now, when I hear any decent live music, I burst into tears. I give it my attention — a process that produces a kind of high or rush.
If we have to hear a recording, let it be a 1911-style shellac disc or even wax cylinder, cranked up by hand, not electricity; a magic music box to baffle the dog with its master’s voice; a cabinet of aural marvels. If we have to be haunted by music’s non-presence (every recording is the tombstone of a live performance) let it be by one of those graceful ear-shaped or seashell-shaped machines, a Surrealist’s delight or Spirit Trumpet for a charlatanesque medium.
The years between the death of Nietzsche and Queen Victoria in 1900 and 1914, constitute a dawn of Modernism that never happened into day. Instead it was smashed to nihil by the one long war (1914-1989) of the ghastly 20th century. The liberte Libre of trends like Symbolism, Expressionism, anarchism/ socialism, lebensreform, Cosmicism, etc., turned into the cynicism of Dada, the fascism of Futurism, and so on. Hope seemed dead.
Even reading and writing is contaminated with Civilization’s technopathologies. Oral/aural culture would constitute the Luddite ideal. But as an isolated individual and lifelong print addict, I can’t give up books, that necessary poison, like certain drugs. Life in 1911 requires books just as it might ideally include cheap and legal laudanum or tincture of Indian hemp.
Charles Fourier praised the Pigeon Post. It seemed quite modern in 1830, “utterly modern,” as Rimbaud would say. In 1911, we’re allowed telegraph and even telephone, but our hearts still go into writing and receiving letters — handwritten, private, mysteriously brought to your very door by an unseen hand for only pennies per message, the money having been transformed into beautiful stamps.
None of these pleasures are afforded by electromagnetic CommTech, which eliminates everything (including privacy) except text and image.
Imagine perfumed letters sealed with red wax and heraldic imagery; letters like Prince Genji used to write, or Proust, who could send little blue notes by pneumatic post anywhere in Paris. Think of mail-order degrees in Rosicrucianism. Yes, the post — under the sign of Hermes — is sheer magic.
Full play of Imagination becomes possible only without modern technology, because it has become the heartless operation of Capital, which hates all forms of sharing. Let’s work for a secular Anabaptism, bold enough finally to refuse everything back to the steam engine — at least.
Whereupon we may resume human life.


Music

Recorded music realizes a dream of pure magic – but at the same time the end & even death of music itself. A Blakean paradox or mystical dialectic: every phenomenon had a “good” & a “bad” (in some rough sense), an Emanation & a Spectre. When I worked in radio (on WBIA-FM, The Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade) & played rembetica, Ottoman marching bands, Irish music composed by supernatural beings (the Tuatha De Danaan, aka the faeries), Anglican church music from the 15-20th Century, etc., I & my listeners (I hope) experienced the first Emanational aspect of recording – its magic.
But as the MUZAK company understood, recorded music eventually loses its presence – and in its state of absence or deprivation it becomes a potent subliminal form of anxiety, often alleviated by a shopping spree or food binge – perfect capitalist behavior.
Thus music becomes background – in expensive restaurants one is expected to listen (but not pay attention) to music appropriate to a honkytonk whorehouse: rock’n'roll, which should be a highly presentational dionysiac experience – becomes aural vanilla for jaded yuppies. Youth buys its latest “rebellion” from the world of commercial greed & adult condescension called the Music Industry. With headphones & computers everyone composes a soundtrack for their own stupid boring movie, their life as “student” or wage slave & consumer – music as anodyne for the constant immiseration (as the Sits used to say) of Too-Late Kapitalismo.
Finally – recording replaces our own voices with dumbness. We let stars sing for us – we let machines come between us & the divine musician within us. Music attains Spectral status. It haunts us with its own non-presence reduced to residual noise pollution.
I had to give up radio (both as producer & consumer) & get rid of all recorded music in my sphere of influence (basically my house) in order to preserve my relation to music. I don’t dare sing in the street (as everyone did until about 1979) and there is no amateur communal music anymore (recording killed it) – no “music bees” so to speak. Music now lacks all sociality except the ersatz of mass consumption to hear live music sometimes. Usually now when I hear any decent live music I burst into tears. I give it my attention – a process that produces a kind of high or rausch.
If we have to hear a recording let it be a 1911-style shellac disc or even wax cylinder, cranked up by hand, not electricity – a magic music box to baffle the dog with its master’s voice – a cabinet of aural marvels. If we have to be haunted by music’s non-presence (every recording is the tombstone of a live performance) let it be by one of these (see above) graceful ear-shaped or seashell-shaped machines, a Surrealist’s delight (Leonora Carrington’s “ear trumpets”) or Spirit Trumpet for a charlatanesque medium…
    On (Type) Writing

The years between the death of Nietzche (& Queen Victoria) & 1914 constitute a dawn of Modernism that never happened into day. Instead it was smashed to nihil by the one long war (1914 – 1989) of the ghastly XXth Century. The liberté libre of trends like Symbolism, Expressionism, anarchism / socialism, lebensreform, Cosmicism etc. turned into the cynicism of dada, the fascism of Futurism & so on. Hope seemed dead.
L. Broadmoor III (who circa 1975 first turned me on to the idea of “living in 1911″) wanted to be an ordinary person in rural America (but with decayed millionaires as neighbors, hence his choice of Dutchess Co.) – he read only books published in or before 1911 that were truly popular at the time, such as novels with happy endings by long-forgotten lady novelists. In the 1970s you could buy old books like that for 25¢ a pound, yellowing & crumbling. Many by now must’ve disappeared completely.
I understand this “taste” or rather discipline as that of the spiritual dandy: an impenetrable cool of exotic ordinariness & secret impeccability. In effect one’s life becomes one’s art – completely. I could never aspire to such bodhisattvahood: fundamentally I’m simply not that serious. In fact neither was Broadmoor: he gave up 1911 & went into Reichean therapy. But still I take 1911 as a kind of metaphor or ideal double for my art, & to a certain extent my life as well. I’ve lived for 20 years now with no TV or other people’s cars – I pay people to use the internet for me (to buy books!) – & so on. I just don’t want to own the fucking things. I admire the Anabaptists for refusing electricity & infernal combustion in their homes. But you need communitas to live in that manner. You need place.
Even reading & writing is contaminated with Civilization’s technopathologies. Oral / aural culture would constitute the Luddite ideal. But as an isolated individual & lifelong print addict I can’t give up books – that necessary poison – like certain drugs… “Life in 1911″ requires books just as it might ideally include cheap & legal laudanum or tincture of Indian hemp.
Charles Fourier praised the Pigeon Post. It seemed quite modern in 1830, “utterly modern” as Rimbaud would say. In 1911 we’re allowed telegraph & even telephone, but our hearts still go into writing & receiving letters – handwritten, private, mysteriously brought to yr very door by unseen hand for only pennies per message, the money having been transformed into beautiful stamps. None of these pleasures are afforded by electromagnetic CommTech, which eliminates everything (including privacy) except text & image.
Imagine perfumed letters sealed with red wax & heraldic imagery, letters like Prince Genji used to write, or Proust, who could send little blue notes by pneumatic post anywhere in Paris. Think of mail-order degrees in Rosicrucianism. Yes, the POST – under the sign of Hermes – is sheer magic.
If only I could find a working mimeograph machine (or even better a roneograph, the kind that printed only in purple) (they had one in my high school in the 1950s) I’d certainly publish these manifestos on it. At least I can still use a manual typewriter, another surrealist-looking machine we enjoy here in “1911.”


Energy   ACME, you remember, was the company that made all those safes for Coyote to drop on the Roadrunner. If only it were that simple. Everyone simply can’t go “back to 1911″ – there wouldn’t be enough energy there to support our wasteful habits. The last viable population density must’ve occurred, in fact, around 1911. After that – the crowd. The utopian reversionism I’m proposing, I guess, is only possible for a self-chosen elite.
Petroleum was a rare commodity in 1911 – like whale oil today. Stoves burned wood – a renewable resource. Plant an acorn, reap a cord of fixed sunlight. I’m not saying everyone should to it now. I’m saying that we – carefree luddites – will burned wood in our ornate victorian stoves, while everyone else poisons themselves with petrol & electricity.
The alchemists tell us that not all forms of heat are simply the same calories delivered by different tech. The heat of a brooding hen, heat of a manure pile, heat of a woodstove – & the heat of a nuclear reactor disaster – are qualitatively different, not just quantitatively.
Woodfire has been used since the cave people discovered fire. It comes from heaven (as lightning) – it warms the Zoroastrian temple in Persia, the Vedic sacrifice in India, the Celtic bonfire on May Day, the outdoor barbecue invented by buccaneers on Hispaniola. Woodfire is basic everyday magic. It transforms food alchemically. It alchemizes the domestic hearth. It engenders visions. It is the body of the djinn.
Frankly we no longer care very deeply about the end of the world. It’s too late for “everyone” to go on gulping down oil & shitting out pollution. The only solution to the energy crisis is voluntary poverty, as Ivan Illich used to say – so the secret is to learn to enjoy it.
Frenchfry oil, wind power, solar panels, nuclear power plants – none of them will allow the whole world to go on sucking up oil & other forms of dead energy like us Americans in 2011 – like it’s “going out of style” (which it is) – so let’s just do without it, & revert to 1911, comrades. Abandon the suckers to their doomsday scenarios (Rapture, Global Warming, Peak Oil, band, whimper), & stoke up your ACME woodstove with aromatic pine, & sit around it all winter with the complete works of Balzac, Scott, Dumas, Stevenson, Proust. Roast some apples. Simmer your poppy-head tea. Dream on.
    Photography   Everything has already been said about photography. We have it here in 1911 but even now we can see how it may have been a big mistake. The Byzantine Iconoclasts were no mere smashers of idols – their arguments ran deep, subtle & profound. They claimed that the Image colonizes the Imagination – other people’s magic overcomes your own personal magic & imprints itself on your soul. Only the Imagination free of such (mis)representation can truly be called autonomous & capable of poiesis, the creative act. To depict the sacred (& all things are potentially sacred) is to degrade it & thus to blaspheme. Only the Eye of the Heart can actually see.
Many Sufis would agree with these sentiments, as would many Jewish & Protestant mystics. The more accurate & scientific the representation the more it lies & blasphemes. “Abstract” art is more moral than any form of realism. Music & architecture, which are simply themselves (ideally), are considered permissible, although Islam suspects even music of threatening the soul’s integrity. But painting & sculpture & especially photography must surely be damned. Looking itself is a compromised or even guilty pleasure, lacking the intimacy of touch or smell or even hearing – too akin to “pure reason” – to cruel.
Against these arguments however we might assert the possibility of Hermetic Imagery – which (as Giordano Bruno or Athanasius Kircher would say) can allow us to free ourselves from the Image through the Image.
Certain symbols, Emblems, hieroglyphs or works of art can liberate the Imagination rather than “enchain” it. These images stimulate your own creativity rather than stifle or suffocate it under their beauty or shock-value or subliminal potency etc.
In the Renaissance this theory of art was called “Egyptian,” thanks to a fortuitous misunderstanding of the ancient hieroglyphs (ie that they were “magic”). Cagliostro was pushing the same notion in the late 19th Century. I believe we need such a theory in order to redeem our various arts – to save them from merely forming new chains, like advertising or propaganda.
Does this argument rescue photography from its own special hell? Maybe not. But maybe there’s something to be said for a touch of damnation. Maybe photography is a vice, like pornography, but then perhaps it could be a magical vice.
If we must have photography in 1911 let it be slow, clumsy, alchemical, rare – somehow still innocent of theory – not so much a spectral doubling but rather Magic Lanterns, a kind of stained glass, primitive & luminous, posed & formal, static, sepia-toned, nostalgic & slightly comical.

    Telephone     Those who long to live in 1911 choose that year – really any year from 1890 to 1914 would be equally ok – just because it’s safely in the middle of that long lingering last “decade” of the long 19th Century – which was also the first heroic decade of true modern radicalism – e.g. – the Wandervogel, Stirnerite anarchism, the IWW and Jim Larkin, Ascona, Sex Radicals & Nudists – etc. And still far removed from the future of total war & totalitarianism to come – a time of utopian revolutionary hope. Also of course it’s the Age of Decadence – final year of the Manchu Dynasty – opium ten cents a bottle at any country store – the Paris of J. K. Huysmans. Gaslight. Also: the last gasp of true agrarianism in the USA – age of Populism, the Grange, Farmers Alliance – the last rural decade.
But there’s another reason we choose 1911 (or thereabouts) for our little Golden Age. It has to do with technology. In 1911 almost all the actual conveniences of modern tech already existed: the car, the telephone, the electric bulb, the phonograph… Now we Luddites do not approve of cars or any of these inventions, which all subtract from the quanta of Imagination available to individuals & to the Social. But we have to admit – they’re convenient. In their primitive forms they’re almost likable. The only real convenience invented since then – the electric refrigerator – can be replaced by an Amish-built propane refrigerator – OR – we could re-invent the ice-box. We hope someday to learn to sing again, but till then we can accept a few hand-cranked shellac records (but no radio or TV). Computers are NOT in any way part of a revived 1911 however. It’s time to wake up & smell the rot of technopathology.
The telephone easily corrodes social presence & reduces selves to disembodies “voices of the Unseen,” as the Arabs called the invention. But again the primitive version, with its “party lines” & snoopy local Operators, had a social aspect now completely leached out of the medium. If we must be thus haunted let it be via one of these elegant sinister objects – a real murder weapon.
Full play of Imagination becomes possible only without modern technology, because tech has become the heartless operation of Capital, which hates all forms of sharing. Let’s work for a secular Anabaptism, bold enough finally to refuse everything back to the steam engine – at least. Whereupon we may resume human life.