To Transfigure. To Organise.
"And what a responsibility it is to see that no one
takes our responsibility away from us." "It will come to the mass of men...like the changing
season; they will find themselves in and stimulated by the situation consciously
at last to recreate it within and without as their own." An imaginary and a real university woven into each other. A spontaneous
and an anti-university. "I murmured something about trying to write an
article on the Anti-University", Roberta Elzey writes in the book Counter
Culture published in 1970 and edited by Joe Berke, a leading anti-psychiatrist
at the time. "Invisible insurrection, Ralph Schoeneman appears and disappears,
Shimon Tzabar, McLuhan: Madison Avenue Cop-out, auto-destructive art,
dance and movement, R.D. Laing, alchemists, Black Power SOMA ... tea or
Coffee?". She continues on inhered. Joe Berke and David Cooper were among
the founders of the London anti-university in 1968. The two had already
been involved in establishing the Free University of New York. Roberta
Elzey was told... "not ancient Anti-University history, but how to brew
your own freedom: a batch of planning, communication, publicity and money:
and tell them, the dream is hard to see, human relations are right in
front of you...". She ends up writing an article on how the Anti-University
is organised: the model. Seven years earlier the eighth issue of the Paris-based
journal Internationale Situationniste iswas published. It presents an
article written by the Italo-Scot cultural provocateur Alex Trocchi, a
member of the Situationist International for several years. The title
of this schizomatic text is 'A Revolutionary Proposal: The Insurrection
of a Million Minds'. The French language title of the text was 'Technique
du Coup du Monde' – in plain English "How to take over the world". Trocchi's
proposal does not aim at a taking over of the macro-political power of
the state, does not seek negotiation with the impotent doorkeepers, a
winning of the majority, but is in the broadest sense, a dream-demand
for rupture culture: a "becoming minoritarian" as Deleuze & Guattari later
urged. The main task, Trocchi argues, is not to take over the control
of the railway stations and the powerhouses, the centres of already established
and neurotically defended power; the cultural revolution, rails Trocchi,
must seize the 'grids of expression and the powerhouse of the mind'. He
asks: "How to begin?" He answers: "At a chosen moment in a vacant country
house not too far from the city of London, we shall forment a kind of
cultural jam session: out of this will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous
university." He chooses Braziers Park, still the home of a community of
artists, but that is another story: "We are nothing all men shall not
one day become".
By the time he settled in London in the early 60s, Trocchi had passed
through those various scenes in which the avant-garde melted into the
counter-culture. He had experiences that took him beyond any one aesthetic
form, any one format, any one imagination, any one personality. Setting-off
from a 40s Glasgow of mythic 'razor gangs', he drifted through the cultural
melting pot of post-war Paris. Here he continued to cultivate the ontological
experiment of his heroin habit whilst editing the influential literary
magazine Merlin: a project that issued the first English language editions
of Beckett and Genet and for which he wrote a series of editorials including
one on language called 'War And Words'. Whilst in Paris he published his
first novel, an existential murder story, Young Adam, under the same pseudonym
that he used for the porno novels he wrote for Olympia Press. At some
point during his stay, he began a long friendship with Guy Debord and
became a member of the Lettrist International (one of the groups that
would later feed into the Situationist International). From Paris, he
travelled to New York where he lived aboard a scow on the Hudson River,
becoming involved in the late 50s beat-scene and writing occasional articles
for Grove Press's Evergreen Review: an international literary journal.
From this working scow he turned-in, page by page, the manuscript that
would be published, in 1960, as Cain's Book – his second, and most widely
acclaimed novel that gives a foreecho of his strained relationship with
himself as a 'writer': "You don't have to write it". Whilst in the States
he also hung out in Venice Beach with experimental artist Wallace Berman
who distributed his own art work via the postal system and spoke of new
forums for creative activity. However, his time in the States was cut
short by a drugs-bust and a term in prison. He returned to Britain with
false papers reputedly supplied by Norman Mailer and eventually reached
Britain via an exit to Canada. Back in London, Trocchi would never seriously
attempt to embark upon a fallow up to Cain's Book. However, he returned
to a situation where his two novels had just been published. His publisher,
John Calder (who has recently reopened a book shop in South London), was
busy promoting him as a central figure in a Beat movement he had left
behind and his work attracted notoriety when a Sheffield magistrate deemed
Cain's Book obscene. Instead of satisfying the demands of publishers and
living up to his 'beatnik' reputation, Trocchi began the Sigma Project.
This project pivoted around the publication of the Sigma Portfolio – roneod
essays from such as R.D.Laing, William Burroughs etc, distributed with
a folder – and the proposed Spontaneous University – a place to "invent
effective behavioural procedures" were attendees could "learn how we shall
have to be if we are to be and do together at all". So Trocchi, together
with the initial enthusiasm of Jeff Nuttall, turned his attention to Cultural
Engineering as he called it: a heady brew of his own developments of a
fertile situationistic theory coupled to a sensitivity to encouraging
the means-of-expression of others. As late as the 70s, when Trocchi's
main project was trying, ultimately unsuccessfully, to save ex-gangster
and black power poet Michael X from meeting the meaning of 'death sentence'
in a Trinidadian jail, he was renowned in the Westbourne Park area of
London for taking young local rebels under his wing: there is still a
siged copy of Cain's Book in HMP Highpoint! Returning to his meteoritic
Revolutionary Proposal article of 1963, Trocchi foreechoed these acts
of long term will that make him more than the literati's failed and frustrated
novelist: "Scientists, artists, teachers, creative men of good will everywhere
are in suspense. Waiting. Remembering that it is our kind even now who
operate, if they don't control, the grids of expression, we should have
no difficulty in recognising the spontaneous university as the possible
detonator of the invisible insurrection."
But if we have to remember who operates the grids of expression, we
should also recall who controls them and why we are writing in the language
we are also written by. Why do we tend to construct a reasonable reasoned
history to back-up our concepts? Is it a matter of operating or controlling
the means of expression? Is it a matter of out-flanking power language
rather than opposing it? Should we open up "a ski-slope towards the reconciliation
of passion and logic" as Asger Jorn wrote of James Joyce in 1960? What
tenfold tendentious fall then is required? Fall, Flick, Flee finishing
school summer us cants cant create interstitial red cities, passionate
instantiations, bare life to be boded bodied climacterics of becoming
beholden to once-occurent relational moments remembered, rescened, unscreened.
Ambition breeds on bull markets and banality pays for Madonna's hand-outs,
but I and I (we-too) is laden with the loot of in(ex)filtration learning
so as to appease sufferation ("four pound an hour with the discipline
shit on top") and build the drive site for desire to thrive as world change.
Come Back Fourier! Joyce was bulwarked by the insular literary, Breton
backed-off into supra-ego so it's now a know No! to security guard satraps
educusing you and you of a singing deviant logic to reveal only safe hand
ownership of their cap-aim-ist deviant logic. They can keep it and kow-tow.
We can blurr into an interleaving non-book of dispersed relationship.
Sort the shit out in us. Knowledge? Answer from afar = "a measuring of
earlier and later errors by one another". Knowledge? Answer from aclose
= buckled time of embraceable communardic exits. Epistemophiliac drive
cums with its accumulated precursors – Spontaneous University at Braziers
Park 1964 AND Anti-University at Rivington Street 1969 AND Villa 21 – pre-cursor globin of repeat repeat repeat to build drive to know again
anew that the rich man's heaven is ever the poor man's hell. Heave-to
sacrilegious educators with your blaspheming contradictions! Neil, Neil
Summerhill! Frienet's strolling learning! Trocchi's ego-optics! Epistemophiliac
drive then iswas suffers music: auricular dialectic back into lithe language,
the breakthrough mistake of meconnaissance. The missing link is sister
Sylvia Pankhurst's simultaneous nineteen twenties exits -> Suffragette
and sister -> Left Communist and comrade -> Ethiopian and unexpressed
existent! Her last leg reveals the spirit of love. Seen! Sibilants and
saliva are the tools of plunderd learning, of excavated accumulative layers.
We speak to connect the raw and the smooth, the rough and the cooked.
"Shucks" is of great value if value is a between and knowledge is also
social wealth not a soloing out from the midden heap of recreant culture.
For who after all knows all except the oily tex rich man expropriatex
with his silex codex and his door of the law? Bang, Bong! We find the
limits of our freedom to go back and try again. It's terrific to try:
that's what it says on your uncleffed certificate from us! Try your own
tri-way-dix meet! Kapow! Instant meiosis fleeting! Street assembly on
Laessoesgade Lane, under the arches, on the lake crook book, in the oneiric
screen it's all what we will be here comes everybody again, an unseen
I and uselessness to be awarded. By the high unhired sensi-scortch of
old-new it's tendentiousness that's velveteen! It's concrete that's translucent!
Oh! Old Moles we miss you with your modicum of maxi-marginal assembly
form! Thus socially inbred among tongues it's you shot ground down revivifying
that inspire us to basic banality bliss. So to tend to the fall, the off-track
untrammelled yet untravelled to fall again: it's this not to be taken
as real, but as the best failing falling we can muster, the best overreaching
becoming, an incorporeal transformation in honour and in cahoots to all
deeducators with bowed synthesised heads.
Trying to self-institutionalise in language, synthesising minoritorian
expression motors, institutionalising an anti-language... just as Joe
Berke took part in institutionalising an anti- university, an anti-hospital,
an anti-family, an anti-theatre AND Pasolini sought to transfigure and
organise AND between the same times non-anti-pyshciatrist David Cooper
took a part in disestablishing a Villa 21, 22, 23. Cooper: "In poetry
there is a multiplicity of specifities". In 'madness' too, those same
complicities of an anti-complex impulse semiotic. Change the word's enveined
deposit! Unmarble it! Outflank power language into the diffuse landscapes
of becoming the lag gap of your own knowledge! Becoming Eternal Return!
Becoming: to be spurred-on by intense identification which creates inhering
precipitates called catalytic convertors ('person' is such a shit word).
Becoming Byron: feeling like the warning of what you feel now! Isn't it
a matter of these womanifold acts of institution being the minimum necessary
form in which to seize what Trocchi described as the "intuition which
drives us to articulate"? Whether Cooper ever met Trocchi has to be, for
now, a matter of conjecture (the file is in a different country), but
the two could have multiplied without meeting for they share the same
wariness of the 'madness' this society induces in us through its econometric
urge for us to be individuals. And so, the two of them also share a suspicion
of language: Trocchi was suspicious of a crafted, despontaneised authorship
of 'writers' and their 'novel-products''; Cooper was suspicious of a normalising
technicality of a symptom-lexicon that wards-off any experience of language
as that which can continually originate again and again with each person.
For Cooper, who was in dispute with the term 'anti-psychiatry', it was
a matter of giving 'madness' some form, some shape, some strategy. For
after all the experience of madness is, on many occassions, a matter of
that 'intuition' which Trocchi speaks of being isolated, being some kind
of outreaching of energies that are refused by an over-structurated society
and are rolling back in a reflux, into an autisticated existence. For
Cooper these structures that could be folded back in an open initiative
like Villa 21 are impermeable because they are our mutually-shared defence
mechanism. An insight of this sort is often an accompaniment to breakdown
and is revelated as the exposure of the "precise immeasureability" of
these structures, a revealation of their function as ramparts that uphold
those capitalistic social relations that hinge on wage-labour and which
are ever subject to the threat of a lettre de cachet. Sacked! For Cooper,
as for Laing and Esterton and Joe Berke, 'anti-psychiatry' could be said
to have been a space for becoming. The link between this becoming and
language has been elegantly whispered by Cooper as a practice of "realising
language... of introducing the necessary, vivifying political insertion
of unreason, which has its own rationality, into the coherent, instrumental
and manipulative discourse of the normal ones." As with language under
capitalism, its risible rise into functioning as a 'code of signs' rather
than a collective resonator, so too, the impetus to create institutions
is urged on us to have been accosted by the warp and weave of history.
What Cooper and his Villa 21 project offered-up was that both language
and its dialectical correlate of instauration are activies that can be
enacted and that the realistion of this potentiality, albeit stifled,
is itself a factor in 'madness': "The language of madness is the perpetual
slipping over of words into acts until the moment when the word is pure
act". The moon's-edge of 'madness', iswas, then, as much about the suppression
of these actions, the suppression of creating full speech languages and
institutions through which we can become rather than be; in which social
relations are created rather than dutifully, begrudgingly auto-reinforced.
So, when Trocchi spoke of his projected Spontaneous University as "a
continuous making, a creative process, a community enacting itself in
its individual members", he was not just pointing to a desire for a collective
assemblage of enunciation, the creation of a social relation conducive
to becoming, he was, in the light of Cooper's findings, simultaneously
being sensitive to an experience of 'madness' whose most common indicator
is the hearing of disembodied voices. What is this hearing of voices if
it is not an indication of the cultural storehouse, the general cultural
wealth (and poverty), that each one of us is a part of? The pain suffered
by many on hearing these voices is that, under the individualising culture
of capitalism, there is no means of explaining them in any way other than
through the prism of their being desocialised expressions of self-identity:
"It's your own problem". Any denial of this, any resistence to the individualising-pain
of being made to be pathologically responsible for their authorship is,
offers Cooper, punished by the process of "culpabilization" that exists
in all capital dependent institutions. We are made to feel guilt for being
more than who we are, for being realistically social, for being a written
language of reality. As Voloshinov wrote thirty-odd years before the 60s
of Trocchi and Cooper: "A word in the mouth of a particular individual
is a product of the living interaction of social forces."
Experimental Music – The course would involve students in playing
and listening. 'I think many people swing towards and away from experience
of music without realising its proximity. My aim would be to identify
the experience and expand and prolong it. Speaking for myself, the concert
hall is one of the less likely places to find a musical experience' – Fortnightly – Thursdays 6:30 p.m. Cornelius Cardew, London Anti-University,
Rivington Street.
A wake and asleep – 'Finnegans Wake' as a Primer teaching us
to read again. The book will be seen as an expanding whole, not as esoteric
bits. Or as Joyce says: "(Stoop) if you are abcminded, to this claybook,
what curios of signs (please stoop) in the allaphbed! Can you rede (since
We and Thou had it already) its world? It is the same told of all. Many.
Miscegenations. Tieckle. They lived and laughed ant loved and left." – Wednesdays 6:30 p.m. Roberta Elzey, London Anti-University, Rivington
Street.
Invisible Insurrection – I take it that the Anti-University is
an experiment in relation to the urgencies of the invisible insurrection,
that what we are consciously undertaking in an exploration of the tactics
of a broad (r)evolt. Speaking personally, I am quite able to express lucidly
and comprehensively the main features of this cultural transition and
can describe in immaculate intellectual terms the spiritual attitudes
plus the new economic scaffolding which must be brought into play as the
tactical basis of any possible evolution of man – Fortnightly – Tuesdays
8:30pm
Psychology and Politics – David Cooper will talk about Psychology
and Politics, and how we might arrive at an integrated framework of understanding
events on the individual and a mass scale – Fortnightly – Fridays 7:00
p.m. David Cooper: "To act politically means simply regaining what has
been stolen from us, starting with our consciousness of our oppression
within the capitalist system". But, is it a 'system'? Is it not more of
a systematising of relations, an active reproduction os a certain culture?
Is it not a fear of other voices made fearsome by a made space so banal
and stopped-up we are made to lack all form and place? Is it not this
very 'consciousness of our oppression' that is the crucial taboo? There
are too many stand-ins for to make a living culture! "You don't have to
write it"!
The cultural jam-session mixes voices arising from a group, not individual
voices but just voices weaving into each other forming the fabric of a
poetastic collectivity – a provisional subjectivity, existing for a glance
and then disappearing – a corporeal transformation of the future past
people presenced hearing voices, listening and experiencing and expanding
and prolonging the sounds of a collective enunciation, becoming a brain,
becoming a meshwork of citations that are ever expanding into other networks
and other civil and savage situations. Bleeds please! Pent-up antes! The
Spontaneous and the Anti-University is here now. (Stoop) I will would
can develop a notion of off-knowledge arranging tomorrow together collective
is can be creation relation (Please stoop) branching into eventless events
everywhere everything
Howard Slater & Jakob Jakobsen
– David Cooper (1978)
– Alexander Trocchi (1964)
Break Flow/Copenhagen Free University/Infopool/ January 2002
