Sunday, April 5, 2009

196

Pro-revolutionary might find this a dull and unimportant lesson
but 'anti capitalism' has predicated itself of the assumption of
radical expressivity, the pivotal moment of any Reclaim The
Streets event is the arrival of a smuggled in soundsystem. Oscar
Wilde never made a claim for the revolutionary potential of poetry,
he understood that revolution belonged to the working class, anti-
capitalists have forgotten this, for them cultural manifestations in
the streets are manifestations of resistance to capitalism. But
radical expressivity is is only a final layer of varnish of a product that
has had a long trip down a conveyor belt, why should this last
process of many be valued so highly? To advocate an anti-
capitalist culture in the belief that it can be 'spread' and will
eventually overthrow capital is a confusion of cultural content for
productive form; anti-capitalism is a fragment of pop culture and
functions as such, it cannot escape its confines, even when down to
the repetitious and exclusive nature of its events.

Next section but keep thinking Expressivity.

The only time a weasel makes a sound is when it's dying. All its life
in silence and suddenly its got a slot to say for itself, too much, and
then it's cut short. Expressivity is the whine of defeat, it is the
sound of pressure, of the pips squeaking.

In the end we return to the last avant gardes, those who would
make themselves real, through them we finally define the last
and most radical figure of expressivist personal politics. The avant
garde set-up, the avant garde set-up that found politics (and by
1960 there was not other avant garde) is this: there is an
impossible situation, no exit, a sense of stillness and perhaps a
total non-appearance of social dissonance so we place ourselves
in the space, we will make ourselves and our gesture the object at
issue, we will do something and we shall be registered.


Aesthetic considerations have become a fundamental of
revolutionary politics since 1950 and have found no adequate
critique since, in the last three years in London there has been a
concerted attempt to revise les ballet des rues in Carnival Against
Capitalism, Guerrilla Gardening
and Mayday Monopoly. These
interventions have been staged as attempts at establishing a

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