From: Christopher Gray <rasputin-AT-teleport.com>
Date: 01 Oct 2005 15:03:15 UTC   (09:03:15 AM in author's locale)
To: surrealistinvestigations-AT-yahoogroups.com

Reinventing the "Daily" and Authenticating "Life" in "Daily Life"

1 - "accent" the critique of museums as if from the mouths of those whose role it is to re-project (re-present) the deified, propertized, commoditized (all historical expressions and evolutions of the reified) such that the critique is assimilated like an unsuspected virus - at first - to the passive consumer of one's possible self as spectacle. Perhaps disseminated as a handout by "officials". Perhaps announcing the show about the reified consumer. Perhaps announcing the closing of the museum as such and calling for the active shutdown by others of the rest of a dead social relations of the inauthentic. Perhaps it could be scented to be from bored workers at the museum: "we'd strike but why bother?"

2 - this scandalization of "the one" could be accentuated to a fuller, more affective critique by timing it with critiques of zoos (the jail of the senses), porno shops (the entrapment and spectacularization of desire), labor halls (the enslavement of creativity), parking meters (space colonization), bus stops (adventure reduced to the linear A-to-B), grocery stores (the sensual reduced to geometric planes of the symbolic and the assimilation of the quantitative), etc.

3 - so the project doesn't become a spectacle, the goal is to activate a network of vision and connectivity that did not exist prior to the intervention. We could also figure out ways to make it reusable and localizable - by language, geography, and time. Still, for a generalized whole to be ignited we must figure out what - besides the scandal's notoriety - that can be accomplished, sustained, and expanded to going to the next level. Measures should be considered and dispensed with "the kit" so no one gets busted for trespass, impersonation, or surveillance filings. Disguises, hit-and-run distribution, posters all seem viable.

4 - the critique itself should be wielded as both subtractive and additive - exposing and positing - negating and affirming. Balanced between the already possible and the reach for the beyond. It should not be just a passively consumed advertisement for "a better life" that dangles there like tormentuous tantalization and beautiful torture.  It needs to offer the achievable by touching those who have already achieved so much - even if in reified form. Ghosts and shadows are not to be feared but instead un-deified for their power, for the reintegration of their implied self-power and made social again. This reaching down inside the soulless - down beyond the colonized behavior and characterological filters - is where we shall find our new comrades. Or so I think and feel and dream….

I suggest looking at "The San Francisco" project unleashed by the post-S.I. group Point Blank in the early 1970s for the  form/content of such an undertaking. They attacked welfare/unemployment centers, shopping centers (consumption), mass transit, employment (production) arenas/areas. See Situationist page at the Lust for Life site and look in the Point Blank section.

The project could be coordinated around the passions to interrupt, play and imagine. The synchronization, methods of distribution, and points of inversion to attack could be where formality comes in. This could be very fun and could be set to go off in multiple geo-zones, even across languages.

Any interest? I would be really excited to join forces on this project. I see it as a real step ahead in formal attack that is not steeped in the deadends of artistic flair, leftoid motivation, anarchoid tantrum, and rightoid expose, yet using the best from the kernels of truth from all these mal-motivated persuasions. Fun with your brain is fundamental, so why not use it to rearrange the social terrain with consequence?!

best wishes for it all,
christopher

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