Make Property History
22Apr09
This blog will be launched officially with the following post, ‘Accelerated Excrement.’
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This blog will be launched officially with the following post, ‘Accelerated Excrement.’
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“how does one establish this, not least when one is subject to a commonality that uses every opportunity to deny this, weaving endless fabrics of deceit predicated on principles of sovereignty and ownership?” cool point which plunges us into the grit because if you do live your life without property, i.e. not owning a house, alot of the house owners percieve and address themselves towards you in unecessarily hierachical ways. if your language and experience differs too much from theirs they simply ignore you and hunt out other people relative to themselves. i mean its not often i have quayside property developers around to a dinner party, or them phoning me to ask about the latest sampler and fx configuration im exploring.
“what it manifestly has to offer.” what does life offer without property? no cars, where we gonna go? no houses, where we gonna sleep? no instruments, we just gonna sing and yelp? or do you mean something else?
“I am too prone to mistrust my sources to rely on how they inform my outlook.” supertop perception because i know miners and they dont at all act how Leslie’s quote romanticises their varying creed with poets.
“In terms of practical use, what I am interested in is a way to negotiate movement through articulation of insight. I want to start rubbing a froth out of crevices that conceal a contradiction about what is and what counts. At best, I would want the enquiry itself to dislodge the gunge that clings to convenience and compromise.” this is exlent, your on the edge, your wanting discourse while at the same time realising the barbed wire has to be there too, which is why the masses cannot be convinced yet, which religion wrecked with its ideas of truth. people still believe preists dont lie even though we all know they harbour and many are pedeophiles.
why not email sir blob and inform him of the trajectory of thought manifesting itself around Owen, Fourier, Saint Simon, Hess, etc? stick his reply or his non reply up here as a blog, we’ll have a flat intellectual laugh, psuedo style of course.
i get to thinking because the advocation of a propertyless world offers a beautiful way of living that we have no way of proving, let alone convincing enough people to join in, the thinking of, then acts, as a kind of precipice the thinker enjoys spending their time imaginatively, looking over and/or into – over the precipice leads to an abyss? what you think? could you simply have a penchant for abyss’? improv and the roots of hip hop? are they abyss’? i can think they are.
heres a neat way to encounter the abyss if you so choose. make a list of all your property and stick it up on this blog. ill inform you of which items id like to releive you of, thus making your dream/philosophy become ever closer to your reality, thus increasing in someways your own satisfaction with your own existence, thus presenting your thoughts, which wont go away, with some vital empiricals, thus i score a sampler and maybe a new bag and widescreen tv. now. this is not going to happen, engels could not arrive at the same perspective, but think on this, just contemplating giving away your property and listing it, then blogging it, affords you a kind of powered backpack that will lift you and you mental formulations of the edge of the precipice to a position over the abyss, thus, hopefully, focusing your mind in ways you can or may wish to control. an example – im a musician too, across the twnty or so years ive been musicking ive stumbled across record collectors who fetishize their collections, polish the records, get neat and tidy with their pile, alphabetalise the fuckers when boring days are encountered, spend their money on plastic that then builds houses and property for the people the record distributers choose to highlight with their promotional budgets. now im an investigative type and it failed to go away from my array that these record collectors also had with them an inner tension i found distasteful, as a consequence i have sold the entirety of three record collections searching for a possible freedom. ipods removed this obstacle.
top blog man. “half wit philanthropist” possibly because he knew his future was away from the gliteratti only having the boomtown rats as a shaky social foundation?
cool point which plunges us into the grit because if you do live your life without property, i.e. not owning a house, alot of the house owners percieve and address themselves towards you in unnecessarily hierachical ways.
Indeed. Which is why I can’t hope to pursuer utopian ends. Instead, I want to try and identify points that show up the principle of private ownership as being forces that work against humans. I want to isolate specific examples and scoop away the padding that cushions it so as to dislodge the Devil’s Toenail of an ancient contradiction whose fossil deeply inscribes the codes we accept as the order of things. I have to be sure not to make claims or proposals for any better alternative – somany people that have made these observations have used them as the foundation for some isolationist creed. I guess more than anything I feel I need to be better at articulating what’s wrong in a given situation where freedom of movement is denied.
What does life have to offer? Well, I’m fucked if I know. Except that I know that things can be amazing, fantastic, beautiful, and that more often than not they aren’t because access to them is made unnecessarily difficult or impossible. I am a joint-owner of the house I live in, and for years that has felt like a terrifying burden, a weight dragging me down, a liability where something can go slightly wrong and movement is constricted. Or cars. If you own a car you can go anywhere at any time. Except that it costs a lot of money to: acquire one; insure it (it’s illegal not to); fuel it; and pay a tax for it to be allowed on the road at all, even stationary. And of course when you do have the car, you have to secure it – you can drive anywhere, but once you arrive, you have to lock it and make sure it’s in a safe place where you’ll be able to recover it at any time. If you travel by foot and public transport, once you arrive there’s nothing else to think about. It is inherent in the magic of ideology that so many people accept the perverse logic of private transport. Further to that, I cycle to a train station every day to get to and from work. I live in a terraced house in a city. Arriving at the station, many fellow commuters are parking incredible vehicles – the latest model Range Rovers are really popular. Big, square, white or silver, doggish, bullish, imperial, sovereign. The Range Rover is a piece of art, it’s a cultural and social expression. Like much art, it bears no relation to most people’s lives or experiences – it is an expression of isolation, unilateral separatism, paranoia, psychopathy. And so be it. There’s nothing I can do to change that, and I don’t even know if I want to. All I want is to have the freedom to move, but the administration is always against such a desire: the infrastructure of our cities and landscapes is conceived to prioritize private transport.
why not email sir blob
I hadn’t thought of this, but the whole idea of having this blog is to exercise a dissent against the madness of his original campaign, so I guess that ought to be considered. Except that this isn’t a campaign, nor a counter-campaign, as such. What I want to do with this is carve away illusory sediment, primarily as a way of practising the articulation of insights born out of creative practice. Obviously, in the original post, I am at pains to defer any assertion of ‘truths’ or ‘rights’; this is partly, in fact, because I honestly don’t think one can ever tell anyone anything – preaching and dictating only garners a negative response, usually not displayed outwardly.
what you think? could you simply have a penchant for abyss’? improv and the roots of hip hop? are they abyss’?
Interesting. Well, yes, I can certainly see that precipice/abyss thing. I guess whether or not one actually decides to opt out of any relations with ownership (if that were even possible) depends on the extent one relinquishes any access (at all) to power. Because the way power is distributed on infinite social-administrative levels dictates one’s own reliance on it in certain ways. I guess I’m not thinking in terms of really making things happen. That sounds cowardly and uncommitted, in a way, but more than anything this has to do with how I’ve come to depend on an increasingly sharpened perception of experience (and all its networks of power and desire) in order to more confidently make creative expression. For me there are two important dimensions of ownership/property beyond the actual securing of possessions: one concerns the conditions of existence itself, and the subject’s consciousness of them – diet, health, prudence, employment etc. are all mechanisms to securing ownership of one’s ‘life’; the other pertains to art, literally the way one expresses – using identity, taste, canon, tradition, community etc. to secure ownership of cultural ‘product’. The way DavidFloat used the ICMuS Hub has been very important in my realising this latter dynamic – the complete disavowal of received modes of cultural dissemination: rather than submitting to the ubiquitous mechanisms of entitlement (‘this is my new album’), framing work as commodity as if that were the only way to be an artist, Float set an example of how to meet the new challenge of digital-network-platforms – make music constantly, issue it without precondition or mandate as and when, thus underlining the obvious fact that the value of art and expression resides with the force that produces it (the actual artist) and not the art works produced. Which is why I’ve taught myself not to care about the property side of production. You mention instruments: I want to make a clear distinction between (as I do with money in the original post) between the ‘having-use-of’ something and owning it. Go ahead, nick my sampler for petty cash – the only parts of my creative machinery I’m actually really interested in is the brain and the voice, well the hands, too. Even those I don’t own, but my status as separated consciousness endows me with exclusive use of those so long as I am what’s called ‘alive’.
I guess this blog has two main remits: to establish (for the purposes of its innate discourse only) that the principle of private ownership fundamentally contradicts what the conditions of earthly existence show humans at every level, every day; and identifying the mechanisms of ownership wherever one may encounter them, especially in the unlikely or ill-perceived, so as to better engage in the praxis of creative expression (make art). More than anything, it’s a way of practising articulation of insights born out of empirical observation nourished secondarily by the ideas of people (philosophers etc.) who (by dint of their occupation) are miles better at it than me. In the whole business of encounter, engagement and expression, there are several key forces one can identify as having a decisive bearing on what one does – I have decided, basically, to try and run with the force that private ownership represents in networks of power that we cannot avoid.
“I want to try and identify points that show up the principle of private ownership as being forces that work against humans. I want to isolate specific examples and scoop away the padding” you found any possibles yet?
“I have to be sure not to make claims or proposals for any better alternative – so many people that have made these observations have used them as the foundation for some isolationist creed.” Agree.
“I guess more than anything I feel I need to be better at articulating what’s wrong in a given situation where freedom of movement is denied.” Is this a point you have identified? I think it could be.
“What does life have to offer? Well, I’m fucked if I know.” Sure you do. It offers experience through the senses. Why complicate the interpretation by slamming a non interpretative upon it?
“If you travel by foot and public transport, once you arrive there’s nothing else to think about.” There is though, it might seem small but it shapes your visit – the traveller has to contemplate how they are going to return. If this is in a city there are usually many options, circular bus, etc, but in the sticks an evening out may have to be curtailed at 9.30 to catch the ten pm bus. I agree though cars are far too expensive. I can calculate that a lot of low wage earners spend have their income on their vehicle, fuel for it and taxes. Which is a shame in my opinion for them. Why? Partly because they have to pay their own way to arrive at their place of employment. Surely manufacturers who wish to employ people of all wage scales should at least contribute in time and money to the journey times it takes employees to get to and from their jobs? This would have a powerful consequence for the environment in the south of England where some non-contemplatives spend 4 hours a day commuting into London? If employers have to shoulder this burden society would experience increased civilisation? Im moving into whinge but the people should be assisted in what they shoulder? Especially in the light of MP’s expenses, MP’s discourse travesties and bankers and civil servant bonuses.
“It is inherent in the magic of ideology” what does that mean?
“that so many people accept the perverse logic of private transport.” I think one reason people accept private transport above its use value, distance reduction, squeezing more stuff into their day whilst carrying heavy loads is that when private transport was unreachable for the many, small town business and social structures were suffocating for many people because people knew people had nowhere else to turn? We need something like car share once we can teach/guide boy/girl/older people racers into dispersing their energy into books/art/music then they simple wouldn’t wreck every motor vehicle they got into. On a tangent – we witness the hope across the world that electric/alternative energy cars are going to come online before the impending environmental disasters materialise. The car is the heroin metaphor of our times. That’s why GM is being supported in part.
“the latest model Range Rovers are really popular. Big, square, white or silver, doggish, bullish, imperial, sovereign. The Range Rover is a piece of art, it’s a cultural and social expression. Like much art, it bears no relation to most people’s lives or experiences – it is an expression of isolation, unilateral separatism, paranoia, psychopath. And so be it. There’s nothing I can do to change that,” yeah im totally with you here.
“the infrastructure of our cities and landscapes is conceived to prioritise private transport.” Yep. Partly because unlike France and Germany we did not get bombed flat in the war and partly the motor and road manufacturer lobbyists in the fifties and sixties right up to now and again the politicians taking gifts, job promises and back handers. Which leads me to believe once the masses, the people, the ones I desperately have a strong wish to respect and protect, refuse to read critical theory, then politicians/employers can twist words and phrase until the news viewer sort of switches of while watching. And that’s before we go into the news being presented as entertainment, censored simply a bunch of lies. The net offers hope at present, but as Iranians know this can change.
“What I want to do with this is carve away illusory sediment” this can only be from yourself in the first instance?
“I honestly don’t think one can ever tell anyone anything” I disagree. We teel the child not to touch a boiling pan, the student to read more widely, the guitarist to change their strings, the team on a production shoot. I think you may make the kind of music and art you do simply because it affords the space not to tell anyone stuff. Telling people can sometimes burn yourself intangibly, but then this burn brandishes deep feelings within oneself. Then I admire this “preaching and dictating only garners a negative response, usually not displayed outwardly.” Because this is a smoother way to operate inside the hierarchy, so its swings and roundabouts depending upon the contingencies one is surrounded with, depending upon how much one wishes to be oneself, then the spiral grinds deeper rhizomatically in the everywheres of interpretation and imagination. So because you want/forced/fell into a house and kids you respond on the negatives delivered via the hegemonic stance of property politics, social politics, memory politics, and music politics. Ultimately though I do not believe the contradictories that anyone perceives are avoidable. Which leads neatly to, “I guess I’m not thinking in terms of really making things happen. That sounds cowardly and uncommitted.” I think this sounds honest and strong because to think, I think, the thinker has to realise they are powerless, in a race so large. For instance you might be successful in curbing range rover access in the west, say via a miracle, or a lucky break, but then how you gonna accomplish it in Indonesia, china, north korea, iraq, iran, Columbia? You cannot. Like engles and marx, who thought they were true visionaries, they implanted exclusionary tactics in the philosophy of communism crushing early on (1840’s) Weitling (an idiot) or Kreiger (Weitlings American disseminator). One must always live with the differences as history displays, Stalin and Moa, went on to consider it normal to liquidate their own political foes. I think the human mind to be healthy must head for the things they cant see in their imaginations, figuring stuff out like Stalin, Moa or Kim jung Il, then the human race suffers via unnecessary tension. Wonder if biddle or the other academics in the aesthetic realms consider “tension” to these degrees? Of course they do, but where is it in their discourse? Leading to no work upon the tension continuum, leading to other thinkers considering their own thought unnecessarily truncated? I would guess they are always considering their own wages and mortgage acquisitions.
“The way DavidFloat used the ICMuS Hub has been very important in my realising this latter dynamic – the complete disavowal of received modes of cultural dissemination: rather than submitting to the ubiquitous mechanisms of entitlement (‘this is my new album’), framing work as commodity as if that were the only way to be an artist, Float set an example of how to meet the new challenge of digital-network-platforms – make music constantly, issue it without precondition or mandate as and when, thus underlining the obvious fact that the value of art and expression resides with the force that produces it (the actual artist) and not the art works produced.” You may admire this but seens as im the person, the float, ill answer in my ownness, lol. This came at a high social price, high academic price and thumped in future hurdles that I may never overcome. Social network sites allow employers to not consider me. Social networking allows the wolf to be telephoned and the hierarchy to be built upon. Culture lab is out of bounds. Most hubbers don’t post on the hub, resistant to enter into dialogue from various perspectives, of course they would have never spoken anyway, having a disrespect for the knowledge power of language use, reuse and reimagination can bring forth to their own conscious. Look how the blessed three march on to £40,000 jobs and davey is left in the wind? Look how the blessed three suffer complaints from students about the standards of their teaching abilities, ety they are still employed. Get people to like you and your in. question, research, be problematic, your out. Academia is unfair, despotic, nepotistic, not radical, full of lies, full of mild conservatives, whislt it ignores the worries of young people paying for their services. “unity” is the worst fkn word ive ever heard across academia. It wrecks possibilities away from the destitute wankers who consider the canon their only opportunity.
“Go ahead, nick my sampler for petty cash” I never said this, lol. I want you to give me it, lol.
“the only parts of my creative machinery I’m actually really interested in is the brain and the voice, well the hands, too. Even those I don’t own, but my status as separated consciousness endows me with exclusive use of those so long as I am what’s called ‘alive’.” Yeah I agree wholly with this too.
“to establish (for the purposes of its innate discourse only) that the principle of private ownership fundamentally contradicts what the conditions of earthly existence show humans at every level, every day; “ we have known this since before smith, Ricardo and bentham indeed the mythical jesus was always banging on about brotherly love. We gotta search beyond this? No point in informing people of something they’ve been ignoring in the face of slavery, Russian/china communism and capitalism for 2000 years is there? I refuse to be a spinning top, a stuck record, or a repetitive knee jerk, lol.
“dentifying the mechanisms of ownership wherever one may encounter them,” agree but theyre everywhere really?
“especially in the unlikely or ill-perceived,” explain more?
“so as to better engage in the praxis of creative expression (make art).” Agree.
“More than anything, it’s a way of practising articulation of insights born out of empirical observation nourished secondarily by the ideas of people (philosophers etc.)” agree.
“who (by dint of their occupation) are miles better at it than me.” Disagree. Get off that sorrowful bullshit man, u got a bike, a chick and a sampler, that’s lucky as fk in my opinion.
“In the whole business of encounter, engagement and expression, there are several key forces one can identify as having a decisive bearing on what one does” explain more?
“I have decided, basically, to try and run with the force that private ownership represents in networks of power that we cannot avoid.” Yeah so why state, “identifying the mechanisms of ownership wherever one may encounter them?”
“I have to be sure not to make claims or proposals for any better alternative – somany people that have made these observations have used them as the foundation for some isolationist creed.” (K) “Agreed.” (DF)
My voluntary exile from involved academia has perhaps dulled my senses, or perhaps it has given me an angle on the subjects discussed in academic circles I had not recognised was available before. I understand the personal need not to suggest ‘solutions’ but this seems to add weight to my previous argument elsewhere that this blog serves only as a debate and is without conclusive action. Yes DF, a debate is an activity – but it by itself accomplishes nothing if the ideas, models, processes, thoughts etc. discussed therein are not used positively or negatively to effect by the people engaged. Enlightenment (if we might call it that) should be a catalyst for further action. Otherwise, what I think we have here is a grumbling trot that understands a solution might be viable (if difficult to gain support) but is unwilling to suggest it.
DF’s comments re personal transport I agree with absolutely. One point we might differ on, however, is the ‘cost’ of the expenditure – having your own car grants you more freedom socially and culturally; it increases your chance of adventure especially when you’re young, and encourages individualism and freedom in the car owner. You can’t nip out when you want: you are at the whim of the State-funded public transporters. What we eschew in monetary costs, we gain in personal freedom.
“Like much art, it [the Range Rover] bears no relation to most people’s lives or experiences – it is an expression of isolation, unilateral separatism, paranoia, psychopathy.” (K) Haha, spot on.
“I honestly don’t think one can ever tell anyone anything” (K)
On one hand, I completely agree, and on the other (which is obvious now) I don’t. Telling a child not to touch something hot doesn’t have the same effect as the child touching the hot object; and inevitably all children burn themselves in some minor way. You can suspend action in another by telling them not to do it, for example, but I believe it is inevitable that the subject will want to discover for themselves the experience: they need their own history to support the command given to them.
“the principle of private ownership fundamentally contradicts what the conditions of earthly existence show humans at every level, every day” (K)
I think I’m now better understanding your blog here dude. Private ownership in a sense goes against a ‘natural order’ – no other creature rents a flat, or pays finance on a car, or gets suits tailor-made on Savile Row. …and yet, various animals hoard food, construct facilities, claim territory and mates, and establish trade alliances (symbiosis, really, but I’m fluffing it up for the purposes of analogy). I suppose the ultimate difference is the temporal vicissitude of those animal dwellings as compared to our own. This, however, does not reflect an obsession with personal ownership, simply with legacy and permanence. As a small aside, I would argue that the notion of legacy and inheritance, whilst retaining objects within a particular branch of society, still opens out the availability of them, disposing of individual rights of ownership in lieu of familial bond.
“Every level”? If this were true, we’d not be having this debate surely.
“Look how the blessed three march on to £40,000 jobs and davey is left in the wind? Look how the blessed three suffer complaints from students about the standards of their teaching abilities, ety they are still employed. Get people to like you and your in.” (DF) In my workplace, ability very rarely counts for anything – it is the sychophancy and the connections made through that; it is the (rather suspect) ‘ability’ to meet statistical requirements as opposed to the elevation of qualitative acheivement or the nurturing by managers of those beneath them so that they can better themselves and release their potential. Individuals’ abilities are squandered. And yet there are only a finite number of occupancies. Some element of sucking up is inevitable if we really want to elevate ourselves. I won’t say ‘better’ ourselves, because whenever we ‘sell’ we detract – it’s fiduciary mechanics. But we all know about sacrifice, and we all know that there are some in the elevated positions who couldn’t give a rat’s fuck about their jobs, really, and just plod through life making sure the boxes are ticked without any sense of personal accomplishment. Hmm… I will end this paragraph here before the rant envelopes the entire reply post…
“In the whole business of encounter, engagement and expression, there are several key forces one can identify as having a decisive bearing on what one does” (K)
Yeah, develop this please.
For some reason, my post seems to hve been denied postage. Which irks. I will try and remember what I wrote and re-post. Some warning would have been nice, though; or at least a copy of my original text. Grief.
Ignore that. Somehow it’s reappeared. Ahhhh, technology.
Maybe interesting to consider a quote used by Derrick Jensen in ‘endgame’ p81.
‘…property destruction is not a violent activity unless it destroys lives or causes pain in the process. By this definition, private property – especially corporate private property – is itself infinitely more violent than any action taken against it’. (ACME Collective)
“Yes DF, a debate is an activity – but it by itself accomplishes nothing if the ideas, models, processes, thoughts etc. discussed therein are not used positively or negatively to effect by the people engaged. Enlightenment (if we might call it that) should be a catalyst for further action. Otherwise, what I think we have here is a grumbling trot that understands a solution might be viable (if difficult to gain support) but is unwilling to suggest it.” yeah but i know you and you do little with your time but give it away to others. it gives vibrancy to the self to be able to allow oneself to at least fix the mistakes and potential mistakes in ones abstract dialogue, which is yes, an activity of beautiful colour, beautiful guessy games and in my opinion leads to beautiful journeys.
“DF’s comments re personal transport I agree with absolutely. One point we might differ on, however, is the ‘cost’ of the expenditure – having your own car grants you more freedom socially and culturally; it increases your chance of adventure especially when you’re young, and encourages individualism and freedom in the car owner. You can’t nip out when you want: you are at the whim of the State-funded public transporters. What we eschew in monetary costs, we gain in personal freedom.” i would not agree with some of this. city travel is cheaper and less stressful in taxis and buses. one has nowhere to park something either thus saving an hour a day. if i wanted to go to the country id hire a car. i reckon i save 200 a month by not having a car and using taxis and buses. chreeeeeyiste – theres a ten min circular bus just along my street.
“the notion of legacy and inheritance” simply a time based issue. the same families dont run egypt anymore.
yeah i go with the coporate private property thing being violent.