Accelerated Excrement: A Statement of Intent

15Jun09

The idea of private property, as in things possessed whose ownership is subject to conditions of delineation and protection, runs counter to all other aspects of human experience. The fundamental human experience is that of being ‘alive’: a heart that is pumping blood around a breathing, conscious, sentient body. An entity forced into a consciousness that can guarantee nothing in terms of how it relates to what it encounters. A Being in possession of a life, a primal energy that one never actually owns, and which one is knowingly obliged to return to its source, the Earth at some point in an indeterminate future.

Clumsy stuff? But 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? This blog (as a (w)hole) will attempt to articulate formulations around this principle, that the idea of private property is not only counter-intuitive, but also counter-productive, in the sense that it prevents almost every individual from getting out of life what it manifestly has to offer. As a matter of principle the notion that private property contradicts human experience underpins analyses of various cultural forms, especially Hip Hop, Collage, and Improvisation, fields in which, as an academic, I claim a professional investment.

This initial statement of intent is simply the opening of a door to the possibility of examining my own encounters with things and other people; more specifically, it has to do with culture and music, from my point of view as a practitioner, and the multiple problematics one encounters when simply trying to enter into dialogue with them.

A logical extension of my discursive position is my refusal to uphold these articulations as ‘truths’ or ‘correct’ – opinion is resisted with deep suspicion. I am not marking out a territory to claim for my own – the texts posted here do not seek to communicate a manifesto or creed. They are exercises in putting into words and arguments my intuitive (but gradually less ill-informed) equation of certain aesthetic positions (Hip Hop, Improv etc.) with the grudging disappointment I feel that the local council has put a code-locked gate at each end of the alley behind where I live; or that I am ready to accept every day that someone might steal my computer, or any other coveted item I may have bought or acquired; or that fate might decide imminently my number is up.

It has to do with analyzing culture from the point of view of someone (me, the author) who always wants money but doesn’t ever want to be rich (or to possess money), and that these two things are in fact diametrically opposed: the former recognizes money as a movement of energy and power, the latter – wanting to be rich – advocates stasis, a restriction of movement, denial of innate human energies. Esther Leslie, in Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art & the Chemical Industry (Reaktion Books; 2005), posits some illuminating formulations around the ‘aura’ of money and its immaterial value. Drawing on Novalis’ Heinrich von Ofterdingen, she suggests that

Monetary value is immaterial […] … there exists an aesthetic value, or a magical value, dependent on [a] gem’s beauty and marvel. This is something that cannot be possessed, but only experienced. The old miner [in Novalis] advises that a miner is similar to a poet, dedicated to beauty and distant from the chains of daily life. He works in darkness and isolation. His aim is insight into the natural world and a respect for cosmic harmony. (Synthetic Worlds p.32)

This is a text (the whole book) I’ll want to invoke frequently. This notion of aesthetic value that ‘cannot be possessed, but only experienced’ lies at the heart of a struggle between the freedom to enjoy (anything at all) and the injunction to comply.

To my mind it is of no small significance that the council installed those fucking gates the same week that my employers informed me that I would not be awarded an accelerated increment, partly based on their failure to recognize that genuinely motivating and energizing emerging artists (students of composition in particular) to work as hard as they possibly can to realize their aesthetic visions is about as successful one can be at doing this job (yes, it also has to do with cuts implemented as a result of the current economic climate, but that in itself is a symptom of property as malfunction).

Above all this blog is more personal than professional. While I am quite happy for anything written here to be contradicted and criticized on academic or even intellectual grounds, I will continue to be primarily concerned with using these posts to grapple with ideas whose origin are, in the first instance, empirical – reasoning them out through secondary sources will be applied subsequently, in a more formal context. Similarly, its ethos – a disavowal of property, and proprty’s securing of positions/possessions (what a fantastic mondegreen) – endows it with a disinclination to be, in the first instance, ‘right’ about its claims: I would seek to maintain an intuitive improvisation through discourse that may well lead me up blind alleys. I am too prone to mistrust my sources to rely on how they inform my outlook.

Property defies freedom of movement, and movement is everything in a collectively experienced condition that is irreversibly transient and perpetually present. A few people I’ve spoken to about this have responded with a skepticism concerning the notion that ‘ordinary people’ or ‘the masses’ are in some way being duped (by ruling power, by the spectacle and so on), suggesting that ‘maybe people aren’t quite as stupid, quite as manipulable as you think.’ That has nothing to do with what I’m saying here – I am not trying to find an answer, to establish a new foundation, I don’t regard the quest for ‘truth’ as much more than another pursuit to secure possession and ownership. 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.

The blog title’s slogan itself has been dossing around in my head ever since the ‘Make Poverty History’ fad-campaign of 2005. At the time I fantasized about getting some white elastic wrist bands made that parodied the ones on sale everywhere from Oxfam to Tesco, obviously with the middle word changed to suit my own imperative. I didn’t have the money, nor really the inclination, but it might have offered some smug comfort while watching (I did watch a bit of it) the televised concert hosted by Jonathan Ross – comfort, in the face of Bob Geldof’s address to an audience of hundreds of millions: he said nothing grounded in any education (he had had 20 years to catch up, after all), nor anything (crucially) to suggest to viewers what might be the root causes of global poverty and how they might combat them – somehow proceeding from a vague notion that it was a terrible mishap loosely generated by our collective ‘greed,’ schoolmasterishly impelling the audience to be ‘grown up’ and own up to admitting one’s collusion in a naughty indulgence. And yet what could be more greed-mongering than the fatuous, bloated bill of entertainment he was oafishly curating? Like Mark E. Smith said, ‘Half-wit philanthropist…’ And now… Coldplay! You lucky, lucky people.

Gustav Thomas

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Tags: culture; property; ownership; Hip Hop; improv; collage; music