ANDERS NORDBY
Den Essensielles klagesang
The juvenile delinquents - not the pop artists - are the true inheritors of Dada. Instinctively grasping their exclusion from the whole of social life, they have denounced its products, ridiculed, degraded and destroyed them. A smashed telephone, a burnt car, a terrorised cripple are the living denial of the 'values' in the name of which life is eliminated. Delinquent violence is a spontaneous overthrow of the abstract and contemplative role imposed on everyone, but the delinquents' inability to grasp any possibility of really changing things once and for all forces them, like the Dadaists, to remain purely nihilistic. They can neither understand nor find a coherent form for the direct participation in the reality they have discovered, for the intoxication and sense of purpose they feel, for the revolutionary values they embody. The Stockholm riots, the Hell's Angels, the riots of Mods and Rockers - all are the assertion of the desire to play in a situation where it is totally impossible. All reveal quite clearly the relationship between pure destructivity and the desire to play: the destruction of the game can only be avenged by destruction. Destructivity is the only passionate use to which one can put everything that remains irremediably separated. It is the only game the nihilist can play; the bloodbath of the 120 Days of Sodom proletarianised along with the rest.
The vast escalation of petty crime - spontaneous, everyday crime on a mass level - marks a qualitatively new stage in contemporary class conflict: the turning point between pure destruction of the commodity and the stage of its subversion. Shoplifting, for example, beyond being a grass-roots refusal of hierarchically organised distribution, is also a spontaneous rebuttal of the use of both product and productive force. The sociologists and floorwalkers concerned - neither group being noted for a particularly ludic attitude towards life - have failed to spot either that people enjoy the act of stealing, or, through an even darker piece of dialectical foul-play, that people are beginning to steal because they enjoy it. Theft is, in fact, a summary overthrow of the whole structure of the spectacle; it is the subordination of the inanimate object, from whose free use we are withheld, to the living sensations it can awake when played with imaginatively within a specific situation.
Des Esseintes bit his nails while he studied a method of removing these discords and reconciling the determined opposition of the tones. He finally discovered that his first inspiration, which was to animate the fire of the weave by setting it off against some dark object, was erroneous. In fact, this rug was too new, too petulant and gaudy. The colors were not sufficiently subdued. He must reverse the process, dull the tones, and extinguish them by the contrast of a striking object, which would eclipse all else and cast a golden light on the pale silver. Thus stated, the problem was easier to solve. He therefore decided to glaze the shell of the tortoise with gold.
- From The Real Avant-Garde: The Game-Revolt of Delinquency, Petty Crime and the New Lumpen in The Revolution of Modern Art and the Modern Art of Revolution (1967) by Timothy Clark, Christopher Gray, Donald Nicholson-Smith & Charles Radcliffe. Though usually credited to Clark, Gray, Nicholson-Smith and Radcliffe who at the time comprised the English section of the Situationist International (later excluded by the SI in Dec 67), it was apparently a wider collective work of those around the King Mob scene of the time.
- Against Nature (1884), Joris-Karl Huysmans
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