Don’t Dream To Be Me - By Mark Dawson

Don’t Dream To Be Me

Protest has become a form of simulation over the years; where people stand in line, waving banners, like there is any form of oppression to be challenged. Protest is selfishness on-mass. A form of political ideology that defines what is right or wrong. Like the privilege of existence is not enough.

What is desired is not equality but selfish interest and is dignified through symbolisms of the grand “SPECTACLE”. What I am saying here is that the protest has lost is signified meaning. Subsumed in to a self-fulfilling-prophesy where all actors in the ‘spectacle’ know the outcome, yet not their aims - a question to ask here is; what happened to the wildcat strikes? - I’ll leave that to you...

What protests signify is that certain ‘rights’ are a given; yet this is life, a foreboding void with no actual rights. Do you believe you have a right to exist? and if so for what reason? Is it to ask for more - if so, then you have walked into the wrong room. What this falls down to is ideology: a sublime yet ignorant interpretation of what life is. It carries meaning into bondage and slaves to the banner; but what banner do we carry today? - Liberalism capitalism, and this is a non-functional part of democratic process: The acceptation of action without cause and our new levels of hyper-communication increase the velocity to which these ideas disseminate.

Look at the human-rights movement of the 20th century and you will see something distinctly abject to the political left, for which these ideas come from. These protesters ask for equal rights to that which I am part of: the European white male. Yet we are the true targets of bondage in the world. We are the slaves; and those that protests (Feminism, Civil-rights etc) are all asking to become part of that cycle, which I, the white European male, has had to cover with a shining veneer.

We are the slaves of liberal capitalism; trudging our lives away in office blocks and warehouse floors for a pittance. You were once free, comrades, from the cogs of suppressive industrial and post-industrial bondage. But you wanted to be like me: equal in the wage of modern slavery. Now time never comes free, not for you, not for me; and anymore of this will be a becoming of my demise.

It’s the death I expect I suppose. But in those moments of simulation, the ‘spectacle’ is real. That is what we must realise; not protest or rebel for. For we are all human, and with a sobering sense I say this to you. ‘Do not dream to be like me, I am the cog for which once was society, but is now the fallacy of my protest of protesting in procrastination; of my will to be that which you once were: FREE.'

By Mark Dawson

Art as an Anti-Environment - By Mark Dawson

Art as an Anti-Environment

'Art as an anti-environment is an indispensable means of perception,... for environments, as such, are imperceptible.'

-Marshall McLuhan

When asked to discuss the subject of art I am instantly drawn to what I have found a difficult concept to grasp, that of art as an anti-environment. What does anti-environment even mean?

First we need to understand what an environment is - Our environment, or its limited perception, is based around our technology (technology being an extension of ourselves e.g. microscope/telescope extends the eye, microphone extends the ear, speaker/amplifier extends the voice). It thus follow that an anti-environment falls outside of technology. This is art; a form of originality that is archetypal, yet the repetitive reproduction of art to such extents become subsumed in to technology as cliche.

In this way an artist lives in a world without environmental boundaries, but their forms of art are not restricted to the assumed centers of art (painting, music, photography, film etc), but are in fact that of anti-social activity. Rarely is the artist well adjusted to their environment and the artist has an air of amateurism in the creation of artistic discourse. There is no form of professionalism in great works of art only the ability to see beyond what is acceptable. Art is then as previous mentioned outside of the assumed centers, it raises the unconscious anti-environment to conscious perception.

The criminal and the small child are the greatest of artists for they do not or will not understand the rules that limit what is acceptable. These modes of communication within art ask us the greatest questions that in the environment we inhabit do not come to the fore. To observe art is a moment of contemplation, of awe and extendible discourse beyond this. Anti-environmental art will only last for as long as it fails to be subsumed, but once it has it will be come part of technology and technique.

Technique is the distraction of contemplation; it give us an understanding in it analysis - no moment of contemplation only thought and analysis. Beyond structural analysis is where our perception is sharpened and we cannot do that with cliched technique. McLuhan say that ‘Poets and artists live on frontiers. They have no feedback, only feed forward. They have no identities. They are probes.’ This is what artists do, they are probes in to the unknown and they deliver us in to what is missing with our estimation of reality. They do not show us what has previously been missing but what is now. Art then becomes the precursor to our future endeavours as a race, preceding life and determining its trajectory.

By Mark Dawson

Politics and Power - by Mark Dawson

Politics and Power

When Charles Bukowski was asked ‘Why don’t you ever write about politics and world affairs?’ his response was; ‘What for? Like, what’s new? --- everybody knows the bacon is burning’.

When we talk of politics and power, this is not in reference to physical power (energy transference), it is in reference to the power of influence. We have to assume that if we are considering the objects of both power and politics we must initially assume that they are one and the same; showing a figurative, and symbolic likeness. Through this mirror-like naming of things we do away with the real; it is the plague of the logically, visual-biased mind, as outlined by McLuhan, that leaves us with concepts minus percepts.

Post-modern philosophers believed that power developed from a decentralised point. As such, does power really exist or is it a simulacra? In Simulacra, that of the naming of things, assigns it a sign value, but Baudrillard stated that a mirrored sign cannot hold value. The mirroring of the rhetorical sign, through mass-media, has transferred our attention away from the signs of power and politics and therefore these signs have no link towards the ground or its centralisation. Therefore, what are power and politics but the appearance of capital in the form of desire and demand; the end of the obliged sign where there is no monopoly but only duopoly?

It could be argued that power and politics do not just exist in centralised signs such as the House of Commons, The White House, the politician, the bank etc, but in all situations of subjective analyses. Chomsky and Baudrillard would argue that this takes form in private duopolistic media as transference. In subjective analysis both the signifier and the signified lose their connection to the ground when they are reproduced and duplicated. A monopoly can be mirrored but a duopoly is more problematic, and may not be possible.

Who really knows what power is (in the political sense), do we fall back to Heidegger? He stated that power is held in standing-reserve. If so, who or what possesses the greatest standing- reserve of duplicating methodology; that which brings-forth a sign incarnated in apathy. This is, in essence, political power; the reproduction of the mundane, the comfort of the known. And who doesn’t like crispy bacon?

Here, we return to Bukowski. If power and politics are ‘the bacon’, as he refers to it, then how does it burn? Does it burn in clouds of atomic smoke or diatribes that facilitate standing-reserve as force without action. How can the concept of power and politics be tackled if we cannot first locate its source, describe where it came from, or how it exists. We could adopt a more structuralist approach, one that observes power and politics as being facilitated through capital, influence and closed association. As Marx stated ‘Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.’ However, the sign of utility has been duplicated and regressed into the form of fashion, the sign value par excellence, beyond the point of retrieving utility as value.

Merton said that media dialogue leads to nothing but a form of narcotising dysfunction; the replacement of knowledge for action. Knowledge is not action yet we are left with a conundrum in the taking of action; where does power lie? Is it centralised or decentralised? Can it be challenged, and if so how? Should we challenge it and what would be the purpose in doing so? We know that the bacon is burning but as we discuss the how’s and why’s of the situation, nothing changes. Therefore we, as Bukowski did, return to his answer: ‘What for? Like, what new?’

This attitude is a reaction to the counter-productivity of action, the narcotising dysfunction within modern society. Therefore, if our actions have no worth, we may just as well, as Bukowski chose to, adopt an attitude of apathy. As such, who better to conclude this article than Bukowski himself:

“Now if you'll forgive me, dear readers, I'll get back to the whores and the horses and the booze, while there's time. if these contain death, then, to me, it seems far less offensive to be responsible for your own death than the other kind which is brought to you fringed with phrases of Freedom and Democracy and Humanity and/or any of all that Bullshit. first post, 12:30. first drink, now. and the whores will always be around. Clara, Penny, Alice, Jo- eeny, meeney, miney, mo”

by Mark Dawson