Art + Politics = Revolution - John Barker

(The bulk of this article - from the place marked *** onwards - was written as a series of footnotes to "A Critique of the Study of English Literature" - published in full in Red Texts No 2 (price 3/6d from RSSF, 2 Canonbury Mansions, Canonbury Place, Islington) the first section is a condensing to about third of this article to the points and concepts used in the main discussion following ***).

Tradition. Tracing a tradition. An obsessive need to order our experiences, a process which drains our experience. The assumption that there is a living tradition in English really started in the 20s with the effective destroyer of English poetry in this century -T. S. Eliot whose influence on criticism has also been enormous. His attempt to relate literature to any actuality was conceived of in terms of the corniest of corny conservative fantasies - the re-establishment of an elite. Though he was at great pains to point out how 'living' this tradition was, he used it in his own poetry (and all critics lick his arse because he was a 'practitioner, thus displaying their own poverty) as a huge monumental entity which he placed opposite another entity - the present whose vulgarity and poverty he revelled in. He uses a whole mass of anthropological and literary monumentality and crushed his patronising and very 'personal' view of the present. Tradition used this way narrows literature down to mere history. Worse it is one based on the implicit assumption that the present is a vacuum or a drained intellectual concept. Thus inevitably tradition becomes academic monumentality. But as the present is not living for academics, then neither can the tradition be, for it is not going anywhere. It can be treated as an entity ' it's safer that way.

The future of literature. Literature of our time is being written off, but for the wrong reasons, academic reasons. Leavis, for example, says it is due to the poverty of language. To say this involves a huge failure of connection. Language does not exist in a vacuum. Leavis makes a token academic gesture at making it social by saying that the strength of English is essentially rural. From him it is pretty rare nostalgia. It is also untrue. The writing coming from American cities is making its own language the slang of our own cities is not always corny. The poverty of language must be related to the poverty of experience. And of experienced reality. This is especially true for the student, if he is taught to denigrate sensual experience how on earth can he use sensual language? If he is led to see theoretical abstraction as being of prime importance, then his language will be abstractly theoretical. What is especially marked in modern English writing is the lack of any content and its poverty. There is no reality to write of except a non-existent upper class, the criminal that we all long to be, or a 'terrifying personal vision.' The sterility of which is revealed by its inevitable tone of corny pessimism. The 'personal vision' indicates the atomisation of society. The 'terrifying' is a playing out of our alienation to each other in an alienated way. Nothing is creative, only expressive, expressive of your own alienation.

Doing it, or writing it, because you have to is the only justification. It is the urgency that matters; whenever it is in somebody, it comes over clearly and is exciting. Only by combating the timeless poverty of life under contemporary capitalism can anything worthwhile emerge. After studying English nothing is seen as urgent. The past and its eternal values act as lullabies for them and as sleeping pills for you.

Very rarely is the question asked ''Why did the guy write this?" It is not considered an academic question precisely because it would take the subject some way out of the vacuum. Instead we get studies of patronage, and, increasingly, the idea that the guy was writing for money. What is confirmed in this is the very bourgeois idea that art is something different, cut off from life, the sponging artist being a classification in the bourgeois system and one to be tolerated. Also it contains another bourgeois idea that art is just entertainment (more sophisticatedly, for the benefit of the educated, being entertained by a product which is 'thought-provoking' i.e. being titillated by someone else's precious and private insights and perceptions). The academics though maintain a double standard towards this. Shakespeare was entertaining for the Elizabethans, but now it's a very serious matter'

Another symptom of the sophisticated academic drainage-system is the row of critics and academics bending over backwards saying 'this is great because it is not didactic'. Didacticism being synonymous with an over-earnest sense of purpose. Thus the excrement poured on Lawrence who has something important and genuine to say - the obscenity of the body's total subjugation to the mind and the ego - the usual accusation being that he is humourless. By this is meant a very narcissistic humour, the modern cult of self-parody. It's uncool to say anything revolutionary and serious because that is a threat and you are attacked for it, thus the huge defensive mechanismof self-parody, is the escape route of every modern writer'.

The point is that having a sense of purpose is attacked, because in an age of banality, anything purposeful is dangerous. Every 20th century writer is described as a scintillating critic of modern life, but has anything changed? The bourgeoisie even absorb scintillating attacks on its morality. The emphasis being on the scintillation. It can stay in the vacuum. This is even more horribly true of modern pop music and its repeated attacks on bourgeois culture, Vietnam War etc. Rolling Stones perform Street Fighting Man in Hyde Park and all but 30 of the 500, 000 listen to it in total passivity. At least 10 years ago, Jailhouse Rock got the kids ripping up the cinema. ...

After doing an English course and by some miracle we became writers, we too would never admit to a sense of purpose. That would be very uncool. A sense of purpose would be revolutionary. The modern rationalisations being 'I'm doing it because Ienjoy doing it, why shouldn't I?' (no urgency there! ) Or, 'Of course I don't know how it will affect the audience, that wouldn't be artistic'. 'The work should stand foritself. People take what they can from it' etc. The sense of futility is encouraged at every step. If,  'doing it because you want to do it' is to be anything more than a futile gesture, then a hell of a lot more people should be doing, everybody. At the moment it's just a rationalisation for a huge ego trip and mass passivity.

The monumentality of past art is the most crushing of all. And its not just buildings propped up when they no longer have any function. If they don't have a function then they can be an entity of pure beauty, meaningless and therefore safe. With literature the whole thing is more insidious. There are eternal values etc. Also the symptom of a total lack of faith in the future (modern architects living in restored 16th Century houses) and of in what the artist himself is doing, is yet more revealing of total poverty.

Nobody has asked the question of whether all art in the future will be nothing but a compensation. When the worker comes home from the production line, he is so physically exhausted that the television is about all he can take. The academics and critics are, needless to say, very patronising about television. But aren't all the products of art now just rather more sophisticated, compensations. The Marx Bros are rightly being heralded as geniuses but isn't their work a compensation for the anarchy in ourselves that we are not permitted? The artist of course being expected to be a bohemian, his eccentricity tolerated and encouraged and marketed, all our own suppressed creativity being lived for us by him.

The real artist doesn't give answers but asks the right questions; Chekhov said it, They're all saying it. Nobody is asking for a blueprint but only the illusion that people are, allows the academic to assert the virtue of his purposelessness. A whole series of irrelevant questions (none of which have an answer of course, visions of futility) is always at hand to prevent the student from acting. And the vision of futility they present us with makes us feel everything is, futile, all equally futile.

The most insidious way in which they drain all excitement and exuberance from us, is by making us excited over some rarefied question, and restricting us to this. This is done especially by means of antitheses which no longer matter and which make us believe that we can do nothing in the future. The artistic and the didactic, they force divisions which do not exist and atomise our minds a little more. It also brings in thewhole bag of sacrifice, you can have one or the other. I want everything.

The Possibilities:

In a society in which we are constantly being fobbed off with (cheapness, with the imitation and the inauthentic (through which the working class can see as well. The fear that we soften the proletariat if we allow the possibility of them having an acute aesthetic sensitivity is based on a whole lot of rarefied illusions, and is very patronising. Why do kids smash up their lousy council houses and youth clubs which only have ping pong?) the way in which a study of writing can help us distinguish between what is authentic and what isn't, suggests the revolutionary function it can have.

Authenticity of thought and authenticity of experience: unearned wisdom, thought which has never been thought out for oneself and is based on no experience but juggles with abstractions, is totally inauthentic. We must learn to see the relationship between the experience and the language: it is direct in good writers. If we can become sensitive to the genuiness of the writing and the lived experience behind it, we can also be sensitive to our own experiences. We can only make this connection if we can smash the academic vacuum: in practical terms - within the present system of education - if work becomes communal. 1f the  apparently exclusive packets of ideas are rejected.  In a communal atmosphere the ease of relating what we read - or receive from any art form - to our own experience will be far greater. It is no use complaining of the isolation of the subject if you as students remain isolated. Its rejection of vulgarity and cheapness will also only be of value if the discovery of this is related directly to everyone's experience, otherwise it really will be only snobbery. It will also be this if we don't realise the connection of this poverty to the capitalist mode of production, to its destructive effect on people, and if there is a shared belief that people don't want cheapness, that they can see through it.

The revolutionary dynamic provided by literature itself can exist only if our reading is not passive (myopic criticism is very soporific). This dynamic (which is the contrast which should become a tension between the possible and the actual) is of any richness of experience which may come over from literature and the poverty and banality of our own lives. If works which do this are read passively then their richness will only be a compensation, if not then they can be DYNAMITE. Similarly with pop music or even the Marx Bros or 'Zazie Dans Le Metro' if our attitude is non-passive then the anarchy and aggression in these ceases to be a compensation for the aggression in us we are scared to release, ceases to be the voyeurism when the action looked at is us, and forces this tension between the possible and the actual, and is dynamite.

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I suggested that the value of art depends almost entirely on the attitude/response of the audience, essentially whether it is one of passivity or not. This is I think, rather simplistic, though I have experienced this really strong duality, watching Marx Bros films, usually suggesting the anarchism in myself, which usually creates that dynamic tension when I realise how dull it makes my own life appear, suggesting almost forcing a new play lifestyle. But just occasionally I feel it is absorbing all that playful. anarchic potential within myself, that it is the alienation of me contemplating my POTENTIAL free self, of laughing, applauding, so I don't have to do it myself, and a feeling of annoyance that this has all been done in a studio; that its all as safe and constructed as a moped. ...and then I remember how reactionary Groucho is.

So far all attempts to get away from the art that really makes the 'audience' just a receiver, a consumer, have been fearfully superficial. The big thing in the theatre at any rate has been 'audience PARTICIPATION'; it didn't take. De Gaulle's obviously expedient use of  'participation' (changing it from meaning 'taking an active creative part in the decisions which affect your life' to 'taking the load of running things as they are and we decree now, off our shoulders for us:' run your own alienation! ) to put a lot of young French guys off it; they had already seen that its application in theatre and the very consumable 'happenings' was phoney. The blandness with which avant-garde theatre people use the phrase now is all the more horrific, because they have seen no connection between their own ridicule of the word when used by De Gaulle and their own use of it. It is not just the hack politicos who are stuck in the false politics-art division; it is the theatre avant-garde as well. When the Living Theatre allow audience .participation (into what? Acting?) it is something that must take place within a hall, it never gets outside the narcissistic mood of being in a theatre. Also its capacity for retaking control of the whole show within an insistence that the show must go on, reveals an emptiness in ones own response, one I feel has been manipulated.

In a sense all art is manipulative, and so far we have only got to a crude distinction between what manipulates you into passivity, the Free Pop Concerts (the DJs beaming as to how much we are all enjoying ourselves, when they're really saying how we shall enjoy ourselves) and that which manipulates you to be responsive. Further we may be pursuing an absurd and futile position to think that everything that manipulates you is necessarily bad. If we see ourselves as a pure entity - as in fact the society which is alienated from us sees us and we see it, i.e. as an entity - then of course things which affect us may seem to be 'manipulative', but so in fact would all human relationships, which cause changes within ourselves. It's a question perhaps of whether  after having been 'manipulated' a person has had more choices opened up to him land stimulated within him, or has had some removed from his sight or made impossible for him?

Most of us don't get too hung up over this quality of human relationships IN GENERAL - we do usually with institutionalised things. Things which have a formal and immobile relationship between themselves and the people who relate to them. This is true of Art and Politics where we are very conscious of being manipulated, essentially because the relationship is one-sided and because of the distance between it and us. That is to say, when we feel we are being consciously manipulated. If none of the audience laughed during a theatre comedy, the actors would probably start forgetting their lines, stuttering into silence. There is in fact a two-way relationship but it is a sick one. The actors depend on the audience responding, but responding in a predictable way. This problem cannot be overcome simply by making the actor less of a tool i.e. by having plays created by the actors themselves, or by having them improvised plays. Or at least so far this has appeared WITHIN THE TERMS OF THE THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE ITSELF, something of a gesture.

The authority that the actor has in his role as actor, and the sustaining of the unreality which the role is: the only hopeful thing here is the creation of immediate relation ships within the audience itself. But even here the role of the 'actors' is ambiguous, if they are catalysts the process is still rather one way: do the "actors' themselves have the capacity for change? The most acute example of 'liberating' theatre is C. A. S. T. going around from university to university ending their shows by smashing some property. That is complete substitution. The Who similarly with their guitars. The audience expects it, wants it to happen itself, but is frightened to do it. Whereas C. A. S. T. have the artists prerogative to do it. This is the most acute case of the classic 'alienation' which art can afford. We contemplate other people destroying the environment we want to destroy. We have to import them to do it for us. 'Wow, that was a really good talk you gave the other day man, about everyone starting to do it for themselves. ..er, you wouldn't like to come and give us a talk at our college too?

The expectation that works both ways is bad essentially because of its rigidity, the audience expecting and expected to respond in a certain way, and expecting the actors to respond to that response in a certain way. ..By the Living Theatre, it is presumably a response of self-liberation but it is still expected, needed. And on the other hand, there is the audience on the West End level expecting to be entertained ' 'I paid for it' - or have their thoughts provoked, and on the avant-garde scene expecting theirproperty to be smashed or their bourgeoiseness to be assaulted. There is also something wrong with the perverted altruism of these actors who go around liberating people, there is no expectation of getting anything out of an audience.

Expectation can be a positive if it is more a question of confirming some experience the audience has had. This suggests essentially working on a local level where the relationship between actor and audience extends beyond the fact of performance, is close, and where the roles are interchangeable. This was relatively easy in a university, it should also be relatively easy on the scale of local areas, in Notting Hill (for example with the more or less collective experience of police repression, housing shortage etc).

This raises the problem of what exactly any art form can do. The confirmation of experience sounds perhaps banal. In some cases it really means to make people aware of what exactly is happening. But in many cases this is done in places where people know what's going on, and the ordering of this awareness is not only of no use to them it is also frustrating if no answers at all are suggested (e.g. the proposed street theatre piece in Cambridge about how the university controls the town we didn't do it ultimately because there was nothing very definite that we could suggest for ways for the people of Cambridge themselves to remedy the situation) But the confirmation of experience seems worthwhile if it is done in a way that reveals the contradictions and undermines the oppressive structures and the internalised repressive structures.

This clearly relates to very specifically didactic art forms, but then as I argued earlier it seems almost absurd to say that art isn't didactic. Even the anti-art and the art of arbitrary destruction, the glorifying of the pure present in all its absurdities and contradictions of the Surrealists and Dadaists was didactic and purposive by not doing the expected, by doing meaningless things they expected people's unthought attitudes and habitual ways of seeing things to be shaken without them having any resort to 'understanding' which could order this new experience. In a sense this is all that art is about though there is an equally strong conscious or unconscious purpose of unifying the contradictions, of ordering the experience, of 'manipulation' moving beyond the habitual, but in terms of some new individual unification. Also in general the equal absorption of new experience into forms, even if they are becoming increasingly individualistic forms, tend to be absorptions into generally defined social norms. The assumption of common social value in relation to a wide audience is totally absurd today and is something very different from the confirmation of experience. The huge critical acclaim by nearly everyone when 'Little Malcolm' first appeared, including the usual assortment of the left, is amazing. Though ostensibly it was anti-Fascist, it did in fact undermine the whole revolutionary position with the banality of the idea that revolutionaries were revolutionaries because they are really impotent, and ending with a totally banal - and yes, self-parodying - re-affirmation of every social norm. Witness the monotonous return to status-quo social values by the angry young men of the thirties and fifties, which means being militantly conservative in some case or smug in others. This was latent in all their work with its inward narcissistic aggression all contained within the stage. The total voyeurism of watching Jimmy Porter working out all our aggressions with the illusion that he is working out the problems of living with someone. Being seduced by this, so that we didn't even notice that Porter was weak, that Osborne had undermined the character from the start, and that the aggression was contained within the stage (one angry young man, championed by the media who love to find a 'personality' and strip him of context and influence  but no anger aroused among the many) - an expression of this weakness, allows the ultimate restatement of accepted values masquerading as eternal values to be applied in any social situation.

But the problems for the 'revolutionary' artist are far greater, because of his own awareness (assuming his revolutionary position to have been worked out by himself) of the social situation coming into conflict with his dedication and desire for artistic expression. Not only is 2Oth century art, its genuine art, revealing of the complete breakdown of any common social reality, with its stress on idiosyncrasy, its personal visions all predictably concluding with a statement of conventional-wisdom pessimism (but without these artists being themselves conscious of this inevitability resulting from their self-imposed isolation and nomadic lives) but also in the morbid interest of critics in the failures, resulting in the criterion: that only the failures are great, because they were the ones who tried. In fact this glorification of the interestingfailure is paramount, so that we never get around to questioning why they must inevitably be failures. (Raymond Williams on Lawrence in Modern Tragedy is one of the few efforts).

The reasons for it only become obvious to the artist who is aware of what he is trying to do, and aware of the social situation that condemns his art that makes it into a consumer product trapped in the present social situation simply because that is the only reality available to him. Unable to transcend it, unless he takes the suicidal course of mysticism i.e. allowing the social reality to be still more drained - and draining his own reality - i.e. a social reality.

There is obviously great hope in the movement towards communally created art. This again lends itself very much to the theatre. And to the cinema, where already co- operation is necessary for the making of film, it is of the essence of film-making. The advantage of this is clearly that the experience of making is not privatised; that this in itself is communal and social, this especially relevant when a lot of art is about the role of the artist himself. In cinema it is obviously not so easy; the required communality has many features which make it similar to any other kind of production which requires a perverted communality. As Cardan points out, a, factory is potentially a communal place, but one which has been perverted not because it is necessary to the production itself but because it is necessary to alienated production to which authentic communality is a great threat. This is also true of the cinema. This is especially true at a time when the director is becoming increasingly the dictator. A film is judged now as a totality; which is an advance, but is very much the totality of one man's vision, the actors are judged on the criterion of how well they have played the roles strictly delineated by the director in the totality of his vision, the firmness of the totality depending largely on how direct the relation between director and-the camera crew is, though again the camera work is largely dictated by the director, whatever his personal involvement in it. Most film actors don't have to act being alienated, say in an Antonioni film, they are anyway'.. this clearly relates to a more fundamental feature, the one so obviously shared with factory production. The division of labour. This is so much more easily rationalisable in the cinema with its greater technical demands. To be a cameraman requires technical skill and knowledge. This factor common to all other forms of production is clearly critical. Nearly all art forms require technical skill and talent which not everybody has. At least they don't have it in the established art forms. This is very noticeable in the tenseness of the  narcissistic university situation. There is the almost hysterical need to create, to be creative, and to be seen to be creative. But the need is usually imposed from outside. This is why so many people get fucked-up over the creative thing. I knew a guy who set himself a schedule of writing a poem a day, during his first year at university in order to feel that he was being creative. The hip cretins in university drama set out to intimidate the freshmen with their creativeness. It's a very competitive world.

Faced then with the poverty of university life (I am not setting this out to be more so than any other kind of a life) the need to create becomes more and more hysterical - the only alternative to all-out consumption is frenzied creativity in petrified forms. Creativity itself becomes something consumable. Maybe it's just a student malaise but there's a lot of people saying to themselves 'I'd better do something, I'm alive after all', and off they go to the latest audition.

This is all the more shameful because art - doing things, even in established forms, - can be therapeutic, therapeutic rather than sleep-inducing. There are many times when I have to play the saxophone and flute, when I have to dance, and I feel better for doing it. I have to do these things but not because I have to be creative. It is all the more shameful because some hip revolutionaries wave the word 'talent' around as a threat, but it remains as a totally purposeless talent. Theatre groups, or to move ahead a little, street theatre groups, do their thing out of some sense of obligation to someone without even knowing why they are doing it, without knowing what they expect it to do or who they are doing it for.

Even for the sincere, the situation is tragic, for the avant-garde and the political artistic avant-garde pathetic. They still insist on maintaining their identity dependent on the sterile art forms which they emerge from. They grope around (the group grope being halfway to personal liberation) looking for the talented, the creative, scorning the party elite of the hack left, they invent a new hack vanguard, sprinting around the globe, letting off sparks of personal liberation like a neurotic catherine wheel. Content with the smoky little fires they create, marking up new communes and new groups, setting up fantastic communication networks between them merely in order, to give some illusion of totality. Going as far as to latch onto some harmless paragraph in an existentialist work, one that is been pencilled with approval by some humanist or other, chewing up these few dog-eared pages and emerging with ontological proof that the individual doing something liberating is making the revolution. - IT IS - but not when it's in a studio or in the Californian outback. Not when they immediately sterilise what they're doing, refine it, and stick it in an updated petrified form.

What is most pathetic is that these roving predators, or parasites, if your Charitable ness stops at 'Shelter', have none of the qualities of either an elite or a vanguard. They respond too much. Their essentially reformist nature, their total insecurity, resulting from their future to do anything, makes them grab hold of any scene however pathetic (they go down as far as soirees though there is the redeeming possibility of their motive being the food and drink) They do not have the self-confidence to wait until something important happens, they are always too afraid that they might miss the most spectacular and successful scene going. They don't have the self-confidence to make their own scene .They are only recognisable  by the question they ask 50 times a day ''Where's that guy at?  - there's always the possibility, the certainty, that the guy is at somewhere rather better than where they are. Self-confidence, belief in what you're doing, only results if you are in fact doing something. Not doing it just for its own sake, i.e. proving that you are in fact alive. The trouble with the futuristic artist is that he immediately sucks doing into his own particular brand of mediation, thus doing, creating, has become defined on the left as writing articles, and if the left is confident enough to be patronising, which it rarely manages, distributing articles. In the creative left, it is reduced to political theatre or film. Identifying themselves as specialists in one form of communication only, they lose sight of what that form can and cannot do, and respond automaton-like to every stimulus and situation with their trademarked skill. In the days of CND it used to be 'call a mass demonstration' and organise a march, now it's distribute a leaflet that is the reflex response. No wonder no-one's interested when you're so predictable.

This categorising of creating is a reflection of what is happening in bourgeois culture, in which one is either commercial or genuinely creative. It has 'high' and 'low' culture. There is something distinctly obscene about this division, the result of a self- fulfilling arbitrary categorising by bourgeois sociology. The market research ends up determining the market, and obscenely creates a 'class culture'. Obscene because it is externally created. Arrogantly imposing an identification with vulgarity. Worse still are those on the left who identify with this myth. The assumption made by bourgeois sociologists and bourgeois radicals alike is that the working class hasn't the sensitivity to see through all this cheapness that is thrust at them. But, one of the few things that suggests that revolution is possible is the consistent rejection of the cheap and vulgar, by many young workers, often by sabotage, when the communal lie imposed by the market researchers of cheapness being what the working class wants (i.e. a totally perverted 'class consciousness' which in fact prevents class consciousness) implies 'take this inferiority and shoddiness - it is your right, be proud of it'. It is just a rather more sophisticated lie than that of 'there is no class war anymore'. Instead of which the market research boys try and substitute class differentiation. The 1ousy council estates are smashed up by the genuine aesthetes, the guys who live in them. Unfortunately, it is only the more obviously patronising cheapness which is almost exclusively attacked. The market researchers are always one step ahead of their sidekicks, the social workers and the welfare. But the signs are there. Especially in the Glasgow gangs who'll smash ping pong culture as soon as look at it. So the ad men, the sociologists and the whole second line army of the monopoly capitalists, is sweating its guts out to renew the lie of cheapness is what they want. The argument that this is true because Centre 42 failed is laughable, precisely because Centre 42 was cheap, combining the cheapness of the social workers and the entertainment industry, taking Shakespeare to the masses, which meant reading out all the bits, usually from Henry IV which had the words 'piss' or 'whore', again being nauseatingly patronising, predicting a response, playing for it. The guy who dreamt up this monstrosity has now dragged his perversions to the trendy middle-class: Kustow's, ICA has the same sociology behind it, but is now applied to the other class. The so-called avant-garde has taken art back into the museums. Physically destroying the ICA is a work of art to be born in mind.

The other perversions are easily recognizable, they are all rehashes of T. S. Eliot, - one of the greatest perverters of all time - (how many radicals have still got Four Quartets on their shelves?) That it is: they complain about the vulgarity of their present, which some minds manage to connect to Capitalism, to see that it may have something to do with it, and yet at the same time revel in the vulgarity - they give it its own phoney aesthetics ('how sweetly sordid! Give me my ghetto suit, James') and thus preserve it, give it some rationale. These triple-faced vultures have in some other department of their minds a picture of a theoretical, completely ahistorical non- vulgarity. Those most to be most sympathised with are those who may have read slightly Eliotish, very moral and weak books like Henry Miller's 'Air-Conditioned Nightmare'. Modern life is mechanical, vulgar, mass-produced, pity me. Period.

They then progress a little and completely reproduce the false antithesis of the bourgeois, by making life totally, unpalatable. There are those who turn ascetic and, turn on to roots and berries, those who make their art as un-alluring as a berry and root diet, in order to be un-commercial. The fact that this also means nobody looks at their shining example remains oblivious, to them, again believing that their taking a stand on their individual conscience will change this mass vulgarity. There is a strain of mind that is so simplistic and lazy that it says 'revolutionary society will be diametrically opposed to this one, so you can't play any games because there is competition in games, all of them'. Their conception of a cooperative society is as unappetising as plastic angel-and-harp heavens. Again they are being ahistorical. How can anything change this society but changes in this society? We are living in it, it isn't a theoretical abstraction'' none of these people have got past the phoney sociology of the bourgeois.

I am suggesting then the very severe limitations on any attempt at personal liberation now. How can there be liberation in an unliberated world? The hippies desert the world, the creators and artists become totally cynical about political struggle, and in doing so allow the evil and unimaginative to exercise more and more power. In deserting the world of social reality, they impoverish the world and themselves.

But this is not an admission of despair or of the impotence of the individual. To be aware of one's situation in the world and to act, to live according to that awareness is a personal necessity. To become physically liberated, to be unafraid of our physicality is a personal necessity, 1 mean its necessary for our psychic health. Art must, in some degree, be therapeutic in this way. But in a world in which most are afraid of their physicality, this therapy is difficult if not impossible, when there exist no social and common means of this liberation. It can indeed be frightening after the perversion and repression on every level. We ourselves at this moment in history cannot be predictive, can provide no prototype for the post-revolutionary society, we cannot know how it'll be, though we can fight against what is evidently harmful now, the repression and subsequent perversion of our sexuality to for example. What we can do is to break down the barriers between those non-authoritarian revolutionaries in whose hands the future of the world lies. In removing the fear and defences among us, we become stronger in actual society for at the moment we are inevitably vulnerable - our sensitivity (which we shouldn't be bashful about) makes life difficult. And if we have no dignity, no confidence among ourselves, then our relation to the world will inevitably be defensive, and our appearance absurd and pathetic.

I am conscious of falling into that masochistic over self-critical tone that is unique to the left. All that must be said is that the creators must know what they are doing and why they are doing it and what they expect it to do, if they wish it to be revolutionary. Also there will be far less frustration and waste when they realise the simple impossibility of living the life of post-revolution, though I stress again that if our politics is not lived then it is useless. It is essentially this very frustration which causes the masochism you are aware of after another mass demonstration.

What clearly is more important is a comprehensive attack on bourgeois culture. Revolutionary art and entertainment will most clearly grow up in CONFLICT with their bourgeois counterparts. I mean a very direct attack on it, the breaking up of all the shows which are presented, especially the avant-garde versions, which are the more pernicious in that they actually absorb rebellion. The function of much non-avant-garde stuff is to be laughed at, and then we can all believe progress has been made: maybe it has but it is a totally irrelevant progression.

There is as I've said before the pathos of all those students, social workers, clergymen, moralists, hippies who are in a state of permanent indignation about bingo culture, while being comfortably aware of their own cultural interests. But who are they? Who in fact is being duped? In fact the more incomprehensible a film or book is, the more they like it. There is some very curious perversion here, but one which I am tempted to say is symbolic. By yet another wonder of imaginative rationalisation, AN ARTISTIC MERIT IS MADE OUT OF OUR STATE OF BEING MYSTIFIED. It is even more subtle than the more direct return to mysticism that the market research boys tentatively got going.

There has always been a strong sense of masochism in the consumption of high art, getting exhausted and bored in art galleries, fidgety in the Covent Gallery during The Ring but being totally unable to move or stretch, not even understanding what the story is about. In the consciously elitist cinemas, foreign films only, gloomy, incomprehensible in Swedish.

The pleasure in mystification put in art form, expressing in a grandiose way the banal mystification that we suffer every day is something quite different.

It is probably worth pointing out that the culture program is probably going to be successful. Education after an initial bout of technology for under-exploited countries likely to become the greatest consumer good of all, unless it is smashed. And of course the bookshops will be in on the racket as well. Penguins know what they're about. There will be more and more Classics, modern ones, as we return to a state of savagery, duped by trinkets with an aura of magic. The magic names of Eliot. Kafka. Dostoevsky are already irresistible. Their appeal resting so1ely on the illusion that you can find truth, some moralist's 'eternal truth' in isolation, via somebody else's  suffering. The suffering of a Dostoevsky or a Kafka is the spectacular suffering, a suffering that is posthumously given a sense of purpose by the art they produced; again the unromantic suffering of our everyday lives, the constant sacrificing for some illusory future, is absorbed and uplifted in a completely phoney way by these modern classics.

These are the illusions then that must be destroyed. We must get out of situations which admit arguments within terms of art criticism only and ask why these things are being written painted etc. It is difficult with the dead of course. With the living the tactic of direct personal confrontation could well be employed. The artist's anonymity is simply defensive, the flash journal interviews invariably sycophantic. The mystification about his purpose as being a prerogative of artists would be a flimsy defence in a situation of public conflict: an interruption perhaps of some pointless play leading onto a confrontation with the author and actors. To tread on the toes of bourgeois art you just have to be articulate, nothing more. How can the artist's self-mystification stand up to that?

This totally estranged high art has its complementary in consciously low art. Another good selling line is the consciously vulgar, artistically vulgar, what is, or was called 'camp' - it is not a solution only an alternative range of consumer goods. Laurel & Hardy, bad gangster films etc.

Everything then gets perverted. Almost all art forms mirror a capitalism that hardly believes in itself anymore. Each change of trend indicates the poverty of the last trend and thus of the next one and now they change faster than the rows on a fruit machine. Art becomes increasingly complex under the rationalisation of its being necessary in a complex world, but this doesn't hide the real cause of there being nothing to say. It becomes more complex because it is so unselective, no one thing being any more important than any other. The new equality of total poverty. Streams of consciousness because we no longer have any control over our consciousness, being assaulted all the time by the trivial unnecessary and irrelevant.

The, emergence of 'camp' is symptomatic of many of the essential features of modern capitalism. The whole thing is immediately visible in Notting Hill. It is the first thing that strikes. There is squalor and there is beauty that of the people there themselves. But the squalor is the more fundamental reality. In the same streets there are thousands of antique and curio shops. Selling stuff that is on the whole junk. (See King Mob on the tendency of capitalism to ultimately produce pure junk) In Notting Hill what they are doing is to make the seediness of the place a saleable commodity just as under the permissive morality  created because it is necessary to the greater and greater, demands of producers with their need of consumers, perversion and degeneracy became consumable commodities. Notting Hill is the Dickensian London of our time. So Portobello Rd. market becomes a commercial centre for the sale of junk, This actually is indicative of a weakness in modern capitalism. The strain in becoming more way-out gets stronger and stronger. And the escape from uniformity more and more difficult. However much the sociologists and market research boys try to hide the truth of uniform poverty of experience with cries of 'change your environment', the uniformity of trendy houses being filled with junk becomes obvious even to the people who live in them. Trying to make our homes unconventional instead of our lives by suggesting that if the fabric of the place we live in is unconventional, some breakaway from mass-production then our lives are. And at the same time they make material seediness into a beauty because they are more sophisticated than the 'socially-minded' builders of council houses making the seediness of our lives into something aesthetic.

Of course this second perhaps more grand motive of modern capitalism will fail as wi1l its primary effort to increase consumption infinitely. Ultimately this uniformity of the poverty of our lives will become apparent. Again I am arguing that the individual desire to be different, to escape this 'mass-producedness' is futile, when the social reality of uniformity and of poverty is overwhelmingly actual, unless it is a social confrontation with the social structures that produce uniformity. The 'individuality that results from the 'personal liberation' trail is in fact only the sum of them social alienations voluntarily undergone,  you only find your true individuality in social relationships, and in struggle.