Monday, March 30, 2009

200

The answer of revolutionaries to the perceived threat of cultural
recuperation is to push it still further, finding aesthetic beauty in the
ugly and discordant 'real' of everyday life, delinquency is
celebrated as a form of total resistance (rather than the state
supervised macho social incontinence that it really is). In Kings
Lynn, Britain, Spring 2001, a pizza delivery driver was surrounded
by a gang that demanded the contents of his van and then beat
him up. Some pro-revolutionaries would probably celebrate the
youths for attacking a representative of domination and the
Amercanized food industry. Some would say, of course, that the
gang should have drawn the line at physically attacking the driver,
but, even so, such events are often routinely portrayed by pro-
revolutionaries as sings of movement, of escalation, of an
emergent generalized radical consciousness, the gang may even
be celebrated for enacting the revolutionary necessity of the
redistribution of food(we have seen how attacking McDonalds or
parked cars has been advocated as direct action, but in fact, these
acts are cultural and based upon certain aesthetics of preference).
The pursuit of radicality or social and political extremism within a
society grounded in extreme maximization of exploitation is an
impossible and unsustainable strategy, all cultural extremism feeds
into the amphitheater; extreme gestures become, literally, a kind of
trailblazing of cultural forms. The cultural elitism inherent to anti-
capitalist forms , which claim to post more real forms (music,
language, literature etc), to the mystification of the establishment,
disprove themselves by their own existence; capitalism is easily
capable of supplying dissonant forms, the proof of which is to be
found in the existence of radial groups, all of which are contained
within the political-cultural field and are neutralized along the lines
of politics and culture. Better to not engage at all, do nothing
make no comment.

Cultural preference, especially the pursuit of the authentic, is not
an appropriate form of communist struggle. The only important
cultural forms for communist are those that may be reused to
articulate the illuminate experience of negation and engagement
with the economy. Walter Benjamin, for example, observed that
the machinery of the fairground accelerates, through shocks and
jolts to the senses, the process by which workers are habituated to
the horrors of mechanized work; at no point did he argue for the
organization of radical or alternative fairground forms to oppose

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