Project Circa 2001-2002. This would have been interesting. Morrison has stated that the reason it never came together was due to losing touch with many of his acquaintances during the personal ordeal he went through in the creation of his comic's work THE FILTH.
More from Grant Morrison's take on the project.
We countercultural luminaries all tend to hang out together at seminars and summits all round the world so I’ve known Doug for years (he was a fan of The Invisibles and I loved his Cyberia book, so we hit it off fairly quickly) and met Gen at the Disinfo Convention in 2000, when we were both speakers and felt like I’d known him all my life. The book we talked about doing together wasn’t Pop Mag!ck (that’s the name of the book I’m currently writing about the new magical system I’ve developed over the last twenty five years of occult practice) but the brief idea was for us all to get high on Ketamine and talk about the universe until a book of discussions popped out. I’ll be seeing Doug again soon at the Omega Institute workshops in August so we’ll probably get moving on this again in some form.
Showing posts with label Douglas Rushkoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Douglas Rushkoff. Show all posts
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Monday, January 10, 2011
QUOTES: ON ACKNOWLEDING INFLUENCES
QUOTES: ON ACKNOWLEDING INFLUENCES
FROM DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF and GENESIS P-ORRIDGE conversation (2003)
originally published in Arthur No. 2 (Jan 2003
G P-O: When I did Contemporary Artists (1977), I’d written these questionnaires to the thousand ‘most important’ artists in the last century, and they would write back, and one of the things asked was what were their influences. Most people would say ‘oh I was influenced by meeting this person or reading that book,’ but once in a while you would get somebody who would say, ‘Nothing.’ They would basically say ‘I am just so brilliant and I have this God-given talent that’s MINE ALONE, and NOTHING influenced me.’ That’s ridiculous! Everything that happens to us every second is influencing everything else. That’s the new way. That’s what we’ve taught ourselves.
D: Right, and to be open to that is to be open to being a great artist for this century, and to be closed to that is for an artist die.
G P-O: It’s also just being modern. There’s the old way, which is all about individual ego, individual power, individual self-gratification and so on. It‘s over. Just geographically, there’s too many people now. You’ve GOT to learn to get on with each other. We’re pushed up against each other, that’s why there’s friction right now. There’s a lot of individual universes clustered here, and they’ve got to start to not trying to keep maintaining that little separation, they’ve got to start becoming, if you like, instead of atoms and molecules, instead of molecules, something else. So, as we’re more and more able to go smaller in terms of what we observe with science in a literal sense, we have to, funnily enough, get bigger in terms of us as beings.
FROM DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF and GENESIS P-ORRIDGE conversation (2003)
originally published in Arthur No. 2 (Jan 2003
G P-O: When I did Contemporary Artists (1977), I’d written these questionnaires to the thousand ‘most important’ artists in the last century, and they would write back, and one of the things asked was what were their influences. Most people would say ‘oh I was influenced by meeting this person or reading that book,’ but once in a while you would get somebody who would say, ‘Nothing.’ They would basically say ‘I am just so brilliant and I have this God-given talent that’s MINE ALONE, and NOTHING influenced me.’ That’s ridiculous! Everything that happens to us every second is influencing everything else. That’s the new way. That’s what we’ve taught ourselves.
D: Right, and to be open to that is to be open to being a great artist for this century, and to be closed to that is for an artist die.
G P-O: It’s also just being modern. There’s the old way, which is all about individual ego, individual power, individual self-gratification and so on. It‘s over. Just geographically, there’s too many people now. You’ve GOT to learn to get on with each other. We’re pushed up against each other, that’s why there’s friction right now. There’s a lot of individual universes clustered here, and they’ve got to start to not trying to keep maintaining that little separation, they’ve got to start becoming, if you like, instead of atoms and molecules, instead of molecules, something else. So, as we’re more and more able to go smaller in terms of what we observe with science in a literal sense, we have to, funnily enough, get bigger in terms of us as beings.
Friday, October 29, 2010
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF and GENESIS P-ORRIDGE conversation (2003)
from http://www.arthurmag.com/
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF and GENESIS P-ORRIDGE conversation (2003)
As originally published in Arthur No. 2 (Jan 2003), with accompanying photography by Shawn Mortensen…
‘The whole planet is the museum!’
Author-theorist Douglas Rushkoff takes tea and talks shop with veteran mindboggler/conceptualist/artist/visionary Genesis P-Orridge, best known for his work as co-founder of seminal industrial outfit Throbbing Gristle and leader of neo-primitive-shamanic ravists Psychic TV
I met Genesis in the early ’90s in the Bay Area. He needed a lift to Timothy Leary’s house in Beverly Hills, and I needed an interview for a book I was writing about viral media. We spent about six hours in the car together, trying to impress one another with our strangest thoughts while Gen’s two daughters fought in the back seat.
We’ve been friends ever since.
I guess it’s about ten years later, now. I’ve gotten married, become an author and university professor, while Gen has been kicked out of the UK forever, gotten divorced and married again, replaced his teeth with gold ones, and done some other stuff to his body that I’d be scared to. Still, in spite of our outward differences, we’re on the same path, and often use one another for guidance along the way.
See, if you’re going to be an artist or writer or magician, you’ve got to navigate through some treacherous zones. If you’re not traversing new territory (or at least forgotten territory) then why write instead of just reading? And many of these regions and be culturally, intellectually, physically, and psychically challenging. Disorientation can’t be avoided—it is the rule. Panic is the thing you have to watch out for.
So, Gen and I have these long talks every month or so. Sometimes they’re data dumps, and sometimes they’re progress reports. This one is probably a little more the latter, coming as it does on the release of Gen’s new book, Painful but Fabulous: The Lives & Art of Genesis P-Orridge (Soft Skull Shortwave). —Douglas Rushkoff
Dougas Rushkoff (DR): Your new book has served for me as an occasion to look back on the history of cut-and-paste, as well as its tremendous influence on art and culture every since. Cut-and-paste can even be understood as a first, rebellious step towards the attainment of genuine co-authorship. From a broad, historical perspective, it seems to me that we move through three stages. We begin by passively absorbing the information that’s fed to us—the datastream. Then, maybe with the Protestant Reformation and the printing press, we gained the ability to interpret this information for ourselves, to some extent. Then, with cut and paste, we achieve the ability to take what’s been presented to us and move it around a little bit. We can create new meanings through transpositions of what’s there, but that’s limited, in a sense, to a kind of satire or self-conscious juxtaposition. And now, finally, with computing and the internet, with the ability to actually author what for lack of a better word would be ‘original’ material, now we move into artistry. But a truly interesting moment was that first cut-and-paste moment, that first moment of, “Okay this is being fed to us, BUT we can do this with it, or to it, and get something else.” I’d be interested in hearing from you what was it like to be part of that moment.
Genesis P-Orridge (G P-O): Well… The preamble would be this: in the early ‘60s, somewhat parallel to my becoming aware of the beatniks, I started to discover Dada and Surrealism. The first time I’d heard of cut n paste, I think was Brion Gysin giving Raoul Hausman and one or two of the Dadaists the credit as one of his inspirations. He said they would cut up words from one of their poems, putting them in a hat, and then they’d draw words out of the hat, and make a new poem. What had happened was that more emotionally based artists, the ones who were actually involved in feeling human as well as just glorifying creativity, had become very disconnected from the concept of linearity, the concept of Reason, all the material concepts of the world. They had just experienced the first world war, which had led to this Armageddon, this hell on earth, and this was their reaction against what they saw as that war’s cause: the misplaced celebration of Reason, the control over information and culture in society, the harmful repression of irrationality, which has backfired.
That’s really where the first step came, that disconnection from, and obsession with, a finished, perfect result that was ‘owned’ by the artist that made it. One of Brion Gysin’s greatest poems, which I didn’t understand until very recently, was ‘Poets don’t own words.” He would do a permutation: “Poets don’t own words, words poets don’t own, own words poets don’t” and it was only recently that I actually experienced it in a visceral way, that that’s been the big change. This is what you’re talking about: that we are blessed, or gifted, or pushed, by various events to deal with the information that’s coming at us, and that society and culture are, if you like, a solidity that’s based on the inertia and linearity. This solidity is oppressive, and in order to even begin to be anything one might label ‘free’ or ‘liberated, you have to, as Burroughs used to put it, ‘First you have to short-circuit control.’ Because control is ultimately an oppressor. Control really does contain all the feedback loops of consumer culture that you’ve talked about so astutely.
I’m know I’m going in a weird loop here, but basically the point is that during the middle of the last century, the idea of having to be an Artist who owned each thing fell apart. The Dadaists did live events. They did collaborations. They did The Exquisite Corpse, where they would do a drawing, fold it, next person would draw some more, fold it, and then the result was the art. And of course no one could say with any of these activities, ‘I did that.’ They all did it, but it also made itself. That process intrigued the more interesting artists from then on.
Now, it’s always good to look at what’s happening parallel to the art world in science at the time, whether it’s called ‘alchemy, or ‘science’ or ‘physics.’ Here, the big moment, really, is just after the Second World War, when we learnt to split the atom and we also learned to split consciousness with psychedelics at almost exactly the same time. Then you had people like Brion Gysin and William Burroughs learning to split the cultural atom with cut-ups in a much more methodical and conscientious way. Instead of it being a reaction against the Horror, it was actually a considered and very carefully and very meticulously observed process of… Well, in a sense they challenged themselves: How do we short-circuit linearity and control? Let’s experiment, and let’s be methodical, let’s CHOP THINGS UP—just like a scientist would!—and see what the building blocks are. And in their case of course, the thing to chop up would be language. So they started to chop up words.
I came in around this point, where suddenly it’s ALL up for grabs. I was born in 1950, so in 1960 I’m ten: my mind’s beginning to really think, make thought processes as well as just observe and absorb, and so I was really blessed in that the material world, the world of consciousness, and the world of accepted forms of writing and painting and music, all suddenly came up for grabs. They all became malleable. To many people, the rulebooks were thrown out. I don’t think it’s just coincidental—I think that it was a very important evolutionary moment, that we still haven’t fully grasped. As you said, it’s TOTALLY affected the culture on every possible level—on television all the adverts are just cut-ups!—to degrees that most people haven’t even considered yet.
I was being educated in an English public school and the basic bumper sticker for those is, We’re building the leaders of tomorrow. The ‘leaders of tomorrow’ were supposed to be the shepherds and farmers of inertia: to maintain the status quo, the Establishment. There was a book that came out that was called The Shock of the New. [pausing] Let me think about what it felt like. I’m just trying to track back. I remember, this seems weird to say this, I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I remember going to school, being told, You may not come home tonight because there might be an atomic war. And I was on a bus, with my face on the window of the bus, and I suddenly imagined the glass just melting around my face. I imagined there being an explosion, and the result of that being me, enfolded in molten glass, preserved in this shell of molten atomic glass. That image somehow simultaneously suggested the idea of preserving oneself, and that the shell that is oneself is invisible and transparent, and that in fact everything I’d been told about reality just wasn’t true. [laughing] Don’t ask me why that image made that happen for me! But that was my epiphany, and that was when I decided to seek out alternative methods of reporting upon experience.
In a way, I think that what we’ve always looked for is methods and media and techniques to report back upon what experience is and what being alive is. And as social life and civilization and Western Culture, which is what I know, as they have developed and become more and more complex, you would think that that implies we would be seeing some kind of shimmering atomic kaleidoscope that would be really vibrant and exciting, and constantly getting more complex. But the irony is that Western civilization seems to be more and more like threads binding rather than atomic splitting.
So what happened was, I was given a tape recorder by somebody at around the same time. Because I had very little tape, it just became natural to go back and use the tape more than once. It didn’t take long to notice that as I used it, I got these weird intersections of sound. So, on my own, by a mixture of poverty and desire, I discovered that I could actually change the order of time and reality and information. And it was exciting. I started to look for other ways of describing what I was feeling, because what I was being told was a description of being alive and reality just didn’t fit what I was feeling. As I said, I came across the Surrealists, the Dadaists and the Beatniks. At that time, it was not well documented that the beatniks were cutting up and pasting. But because of my own experiments and these little bits of information from the Dadaists, when I did see little references to tape recorder experiments, it had a really profound resonance for me, and I started to seek out all the information I could, and later on get to know the Beats too. And at the same time I started getting involved with all the underground press and so on.
What you really end up doing is, you surrender to the idea of oblivion. At some point you have to wipe absolutely clean every preconception that’s given to you both by the senses and by the culture—the ‘datastream’ that you talk about. You have to actually at some point dismiss it totally, and then you can start to make choices about what you wish to allow back in.
DR: I have always understood the kinds of shifts you’re talking about as the same kind of shift in perspective that occurs through a full-fledged renaissance. If you look back at the original “capital-R” Renaissance, what do you really have going on there? Perspective painting, successful circumnavigation of the globe, the printing press, calculus, and then the sonnet (which is really just an extended metaphor). Each of these 15th-cenutry innovations is all about being able to see three dimensions where there had formerly been two—or being able to relate two dimensions to three as in calculus, or being able to go around the globe, which is to experience the planet as three-dimensional rather than as flat. That’s renaissance . And we’re going through a similar shift, now. From the 1940s to the present, you have a series of analogous innovations. Instead of being able to circumnavigate the globe, we can blow the globe up!
G P-O: [agreeing] Or go into space and look at it.
DR: Indeed, or go into space and see it from a distance—which is just another increase in perspective. Instead of the printing press, we have the Internet, which rather than just allowing the individual in his drawing room to interpret a piece of literature, enables him or her to write one and then disseminate it through the whole network. Instead of just having perspective painting which allows you to see three dimensions on two, you get the holograph, which allows you to see four dimensions on two: the bird waving its wings, or the girl winking her eye as you walk across the plate. And then instead of calculus, which allows you to relate the second dimension to the third, or the third to the fourth, you get fractals, which is about fractional dimensionality: this thing has two and three-quarters dimensions, and what does that mean? Instead of the sonnet, which gave us the extended metaphor, we get hypertext, which allows us to make anything into a metaphor for something else—it’s all potential allegory.
Now, take a look at the results of the original Renaissance and the newfound ability of people to interpret their own culture and religion. For most of Europe that meant overturning the Catholic Church. It led to the Protestant Reformation, and eventually to bloodbaths. But before then, it was an extremely positive possibility being presented—that every man can interpret religion for himself.
And we are going through something like that again, obviously at a much faster pace, between say 1940 and the year 2000. That’s why we’ve had all these ideologies passing through until very recently—this increased amount of dimensionality, this sense of ‘Anything goes, so what do we want to bring back in?’ Which is what happens during any Renaissance. It’s as if a renaissance is a moment of shift in dimensional perspective which allows for the implantation of a new idea. Renaissance means you’re going to have a rebirth. Literally, a “renaissance,” or re-birth, of old ideas in a new context. What do we want to let back in? There’s a bit of a battle over ideas, over which ideas are going to make it back in now that everyone has the ability to re-frame this thing. Maybe what we’re in now, in the 21st century, is this struggle over authorship, this struggle over story, this global debate over narrative. In other words, whose narrative is going to be used as the template for the next several centuries or more?
G P-O: And of course the answer is no one owns the narrative anymore. That’s the thing that’s disturbing and frightening so many people, is the displacement of ownership in a very, very fundamental way.
DR: It’s a sense of ‘We won. But: uh-oh.’
G P-O: Well yeah, because even DNA is no longer a finite fixed program. DNA was once God’s book, you know. Well, now we can engineer the genetic book, the thing that’s the nearest we have to a source book of the ‘intended unfolding.’ There is no longer a fixed unfolding. For the first time we’ve actually almost surprised ourselves. Instead of us looking in the mirror, the mirror has literally dissolved. Maybe that’s what that glass was about! That metaphor.
The point you’re making is absolutely right. I was looking at the television just yesterday on the news and there was a person from a Muslim country and they were talking and they said, ‘Well you’ll never understand because you’re all Christian.’ And their assumption is still that the narrative in the West is ultimately a linear narrative that has an author, that its an unfolding linear story; and that if you’re not Muslim, you must be Christian, and that your whole behavior is based upon Christian dogma, because theirs is based on their dogma. So, for this Muslim, that’s obviously that’s the problem: it‘s Muslim dogma versus Christian dogma.
But the problem isn’t that at all. The problem is that we in the ‘West,’ are in their sense, amoral. We don’t care! Most people over here DON’T CARE what religion people are, and most people in the West don’t label themselves ‘Christians’ or anything else. The majority in the West are irreligious. They don’t have a faith. I’m not saying that’s a good thing—I’m saying it’s a fact. They’re a godless people. And in a sense, maybe, God is supposed to be ‘The Author.’ In the past, God was the ‘ultimate author.’ Well, guess what? We always said we wanted to challenge god and be like god—and now we have! We’ve just fallen, you know? [laughs] It’s as if the story of the fallen angel—Lucifer—has just happened. In a way, we’ve just started to reap the rewards of having decided to ask the questions.
DR: [agreeing] Right. Lately, I’ve started to wonder, ‘What if the painful truth is that we really are a fungus on a rock, hurtling through cold and meaningless space?’
G P-O: [laughs] Oh, I think about that every day!
DR: To me, it doesn’t really matter, because just as easily as the idea that God could have created us with meaning, is the possibility that just as life emerged from this cold and meaningless rock, and that meaning can now emerge…from us!
G P-O: I absolutely agree with you. This is our great opportunity to grow up as a species, and stop being larval. Because ultimately I think we’re still in a larval, primitive stage. Because there’s no other excuse for the way that we treat each other. If this isn’t primitive and pathetic and early behavior, then as a species we really are in trouble!
DR: And just as it’s a painful moment for any child to realize that his parents aren’t gods, it’s a painful moment for a civilization to realize that its god is not a parent.
G P-O: And that it’s actually making itself.
DR: Right. We are the adults here. We are in charge.
G P-O:Hence, it is painful—but fabulous. And that, in a way, is the whole point of the book. That’s why it’s not written just by me. This is dealt with in the book. What happened was, it became impossible for me to make a book that was both by me and about me, because I don’t even know if ‘me’ exists. And whoever ‘me’ is, is shifting and changing too—because one of things I’ve done is cut-and-pasted identity. I’ve taken it even further, you know?
DR: I ran into the same problem in my own SoftSkull book too [the novel Exit Strategy, published earlier this year], which is that if I’m writing a book about our ability to co-author the reality in which we live, how can I do that as a solitary author? So I had to put it online and let people contribute live to it.
G P-O: I think that’s one of the ONLY authentic and the nearest to an honest answer with any integrity is that you have to actually surrender to the fact that we’re in a moment where there is no need for genius to be individualized. Also, it’s not that healthy for it to be individualized because it continues this hierarchy thing. Hierarchical society means injustice, it means that certain numbers of people will follow other people and do damage based upon sort of an unthinking state of mind. So we’re at this amazing point where we have to actually say that no particular person has answers. It’s a collaborative effort.
You’ve always said, and we’ve agreed, that what goes on in art is usually the metaphor for what’s REALLY going on. So when you do an open source book, or I find it impossible to assemble a book about my art that isn’t done by a collective, at the end of it all I can say is, ‘Well, the art is actually the fact.’ Everybody did the book, and the rest is kind of the evidence that that happened, but that’s not the stuff. The pieces of art aren’t the art anymore. It really is the process of not just making it, which is the earlier idea that we had in the art world, but now it actually, truly is the process of Being that’s the only thing that really has any integrity right now.
DR: Talking the talk IS walking the walk.
G P-O: It’s just the classic conundrum which is, I’m using words to describe the fact that they’re useless. Of course, the response to that has always been, ‘But there’s such joy in talking about it.’ [laughter] And then you get back to the cut-up, of course. BECAUSE we’re so aware that, especially in a linear way, language has become this controlling factor–that every word is loaded with meaning and history, that each word is a hologram, and each hologram has all kinds of hidden agendas from all the people who have utilized it–
DR: Your language is an incantation, whether you realize it or not–
G P-O: Absolutely, so how you, at least to some degree, protect yourself and give yourself space to breathe and consider the moment, is to break those patterns that you’ve inherited, and surprise your own holograms. What I mean is this: From the moment of being able to hear words, my nervous system has been trained to an English language program in England, which of course would be different to my body and nervous system being trained in America with the English language. So I’ve got this incredibly inert, inherited, and not self-determined nervous system, that is on a day-to-day basis primarily it expresses and receives information with language, in terms of functioning with other beings. And that makes me very vulnerable because I didn’t pick that program or language! So how can I get some kind of independence from that program? It’s almost like doing karate with a blindfold on, rather than with your eyes open, because… If you’re in a cave, and it’s completely dark, and you know three people are going to attack you, and you have your eyes open, part of you is distracted by, still trying to see the enemy. But if you actually put the blindfold on in the dark, you wouldn’t think about seeing! And you might just hear that tiny bit better that might save your life.
It’s that kind of analogy, that the cut-up gives you that breathing space, in a sense a moment for survival as an intelligent and autonomous being. For me. So, if you take all the words and cut them all up and give yourself the opportunity to have these unexpected collisions, to have things revealed that you would just have forgot, filtered out, were lazy about and so on. It is just SO radical when you start to do it. The sense of empowerment and freedom from expectation…
DR: When you do it consciously—dis-assembly, re-assembly, compression—it’s almost identical to creating a sigil. [A sigil is a picture used in magical incantations. Like the symbols we use for letters, today, they are composed of drawings and symbols that are condensed into simpler sets of lines that can be remembered and meditated upon.]
G P-O: That’s true, and there’s a whole section in the book all about creating sigils, and some of the possibilities of them.
DR: The strange thing about the sigils is not so much hearing about them or figuring out how they function, but the almost-always surprising truth that they WORK.
G P-O: Yes. [laughter] This is mind-boggling, isn’t it?
DR: I don’t believe in magick, exactly. But I know that sigils work, if they’re created the right way. And sometimes they work so well that they almost come back at you as a joke. Like Grant Morrison was telling me about this big sigil that he wanted to meet Superman, and he was sitting on a park bench and Superman walked up. But it was a guy working at a convention! He treated him like he was Superman, though, and had a great interview. So sometimes it’s obviously not going to be that magical, in the sense of a puff of smoke or something. And obviously if you pick something too specific, you end up getting it, which can be scary.
G P-O: As they say, be careful what you wish for! It’s like the genie-in-the-bottle thing, isn’t it? You’ve got your wishes, except with sigils you get more than three.
DR: Right. And you can work sigil magick completely though language I suppose, but it affects realms way beyond the linguistic ones.
G P-O: Oh yeah. Well, it’s the whole Butterfly-in-the-West Indies thing, isn’t it? I think what’s really important is, if you make a decision to work within life, you let go of the scientific concept of matter being only objects. You see that culture is a material, and that language is a material, and that time is a material, and emotions are material. Basically you think of everything in terms of matter, and all matter is ultimately flexible, fluid, manipulatable and malleable. (Of course, as science and physics goes on, it keeps on confirming everything that we’ve speculated anyway. There’s not been any dissent yet about this, from what I’ve looked at in scientific.) If you start to cut things up and re-assemble them, at first it’s kind of fun. You go, Well ooo that’s nice. But it really does seem to be more than that—cut-and-paste seems to be one of the few practical ways that any person can use to truly re-wire the inherited neural system and the DNA program. You can re-wire what you were given.
DR: That’s why for me the open-source software movement is such a terrific allegory and practice for accepting the fact that we live in a malleable reality. Or certainly for accepting that a hell of a lot more of our world is programmable software than we’ve previously thought. There might be some hardware down there somewhere, but we haven’t got close to that yet. People are starting to accept that they have indeed been the programmers, whether they were witting or not, and that they’re actively programming the world we live in. I think it’s healthy for people to realize this. I think that then they start to experience everything—from their bodies to the air we breathe—as a medium through which they can create and transmit their story.
G P-O: Absolutely. Well you know that Burroughs and Gysin used to say, In a pre-recorded universe, who made the first recording? I’ve thought about that a lot. And what it led me to wasn’t so much wondering about that question, because I think you’re right, it doesn’t matter, actually, but what it did make me realize is that the entire planet is a recording device. That, as you and I are speaking now, on this planet, there is, certainly it seems that way, and we’ll probably find more, there’s some kind of data recorded—whether it be fossils, geological strata—
DR: [laughing]: Or the digital cassette that we’re recording on right now.
G P-O: —basically everything that’s happened so far is still here, recorded. On the planet, and in the planet. And there are people in New Guinea living in different centuries to the ones we’re living in. The people in the Kalahari are living in the pre-Stone Ages. So we actually still have the pre-Stone Age, parallel to the next phase, which is, because some people in the West and Japan and so on, high-tech societies, are already in the future, so allllllll the realities humanity has programmed through history are still here simultaneously! We’re actually layering more on top. So what we really have is a point of intersection, which is the earth, and everything that’s ever been manifested is still here. That’s not just a concept, this is actually HOW IT IS.
I mean, I walk down the street and if I meet somebody that I know who’s from Nepal, I also quite deliberately through my own interest, I remember I’m talking to somebody who’s from a different century, in terms of where they grew up. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of their intelligence! I have to remind myself that there’s ALL these stories happening simultaneously, all the stories are unfolding simultaneously. Each individual being, walking by, is the center of their own particular universe, in terms of subjectivity. You’re the only person who’ll be in your world every second that your world exists. And your world is all the things you perceive while you are—theoretically—‘alive.’ And that is your unique universe, because you do go out into what’s out there just the same as I do. So this place is just amazing, because there’s billions of universe clustered on this point of intersection, and all the stories going right back are still here too! We have trillions and trillions of universes, many of them mobile, because they’re in human bodies, all clustered in these tiny, tiny concentrated places.
DR: That’s why the real artistic act is not one of authorship but one of resonance. You know, being open to these conversations…
G P-O: Yes, it’s remaining open to dialogue. It’s not about the ego—look at me, I’m a great artist, I have something in the Tate, you know? That is SO redundant. Museums? THIS IS THE MUSEUM! The whole planet is the museum! I call all of that The Museum of Magic, because it’s all about illusion. That’s the whole illusion.
We really are in a new place. And as people kind of grasped almost immediately, the Internet is, they knew it would be a metaphor, but it’s actually also a reality. Yes, we are actually building some kind of new brain. A global brain, as Howard [Howard K. Bloom, author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000)] would call it. That’s actually going on. These AREN’T abstractions.
That’s the thing that I think that we’ve got to get hold of.
DR: What words of encouragement would you have for the passionate but still currently amateur and underappreciated young artist who might be reading ARTHUR at this moment, who makes her cut-up tapes and homespun zines and online blogs, and yet there’s not anyone willing to pay for what she has to say, not that many people coming. But this person feels she’s resonating with everything that you’re saying now, or might be saying in one of your books…
G P-O: Well… In doing this book, I had to go right back to childhood and look at my entire unfolding so far, as a character. I had to look at everything. And one thing that immediately struck me as significant is that I’ve always worked in collectives. I’ve never had this need, or this motivation, to identify myself as the sole source of anything. ‘Oh, it’s because I’m clever that this happened.’ No. All the time I say, over and over again, we just did what was inevitable anyway. And that’s the important thing, is the people should LET GO of the concept of success and celebrity and fame and fortune. That’s not important. Of course we’d all love to have whatever it might be that represents for us–which is mainly not worrying about bills, for me! I think that although Warhol was wonderful, he did us all a great disservice by making celebrity into this red herring. And I think that people will find that if they just, as I used to say, ‘change your own bedroom and you can change the world.’ It’s about self-discovery and it’s about collaboration and collective action, WITHOUT any kind of narcissistic, secret agenda. That’s over. You know, sometimes someone for whatever reason happens to be chosen to represent a collective metaphor, as a person. That’s why I chose a fictional character, Genesis P-Orridge, in the first place. Neil Megson is the artist, not Genesis. Neil Megson created this fictional character, and then let loose that character to see if it was true that you could cut and paste a person, and what would happen if you put a truly flexible and malleable being out there.
D: But ‘Genesis’ is still the author of the book.
G P-O: Actually I don’t think it says that. I think if you look it doesn’t say that at all. It says it’s by everyone else.
D: Oh, right. “With text by…”
G P-O: Yeah. See?
D: Well, Neil’s not on there.
G P-O: No, but he’s discussed in one chapter. So no, I don’t put myself as the author. I’m not the author. I’m blessed to have let other people do it for me! [laughs] This is an open-source book, see? I said to everybody, Look you’ve got carte blanche for once, no one’s gonna censor you, you can use me as an excuse to say something you’ve always wanted to say, I don’t care, I don’t have to agree with you, use ‘Genesis P-Orridge’ the idea to say whatever you want, and if you need Genesis P-Orridge the idea to trigger something, feel free. And that’s basically how the book happened, as you know. And that’s why I love it so much. Because I got to see it happen too. I was just as much of a witness as anyone who reads it. And of course truly I do feel incredibly humbled and honored by the amount of positive energy that people gave me based around this character, that they HAVE found that something was useful for them. And at the end, the last page says, ‘To be continued.’ For the very reason that this isn’t over, this is an ongoing thing. I don’t know the end. That’s why there’s all these different faces in there. Which one is me? I don’t know. Funny thing is none of those is how I look now, so…
It’s all about letting go of those preconceptions, and not being afraid to not exist in a sense, because even as you are theoretically here and present, you still don’t really know if you exist. It’s incredibly liberating when you let go of that need, and let yourself become fictional–as well as knowing you’re fictional. Because actually we all are fictions. We’re all just stories unfolding.
D: And until you accept that you’re fictional, you don’t stand a chance of writing your own story. You get too bogged down.
G P-O: In answer to that question, then, with those people, right, that you want me to encourage them. However this may sound, this is the basic exercise I’ve used. First of all is the classic Sufi thing, which is ‘Always try to go to sleep feeling that the day you’ve just had, something extra was added into the word’—something that you’re proud of, or pleased about. It may be that you cleaned a room. Or you wrote a nice postcard to a friend. Or made a phone call to Mum. It doesn’t have to be grand. Something happened that day, that wouldn’t’ve happened without you being alive, something that is somehow to you a positive thing. Feed the dog, stroke it, whatever. That’s one thing to do. The other exercise is to be able to think at any moment during the day, whenever you’re doing something… like if you’re writing a letter, think to yourself, ‘If I died now, and my life was judged by what this letter is like, would I be proud of that?’ Do EVERYTHING as if that so meticulously, make it so full of passion and of love for the moment and for the thing that you’re doing, so that you would always be proud to be remembered by that thing. Whatever it is, whether it’s cooking for a friend, washing up, anything. To always feel honorable and proud and that you’ve given love back by the way that you act every day.
And then another exercise is this: Imagine your life is a book, and you’re going to write this book. So when you’re thinking, What should I do? Should I have this relationship or not? or something, you can think in terms of would doing that make for an interesting chapter. Even now sometimes I sit back with Miss Jackie and go, There’s another good page in the book. [laughs] The Theoretical Autobiography that I could never write because it’s too much stuff, but… It’s a good exercise, to just go ‘Well yeah, that was a good bit of the book.’ Sometimes it’s ‘Well that was dramatic, but that was a good bit of the book too.’ Or, ‘That was terrible, oh, argh, but it’ll look great in the book.’ Or if you want to get more contemporary, you can imagine your life as a movie: ‘Was that a good scene?’
Suddenly you will find more balance. The great ups and the great downs start to become the coloring of the story—they start to have their own special value and emotional joy, because it’s YOUR story and it’s your passion and it’s your tragedy and it’s your moment of adulation. It’s your moment of…whatever. All these wonderful emotional events that take place that make us more individual than anything else–those are always wonderful, no matter how hard they are to experience. And that’s the other thing, the other trick: always try to work with other people, because none of us know everything. My feeling is, if I can have one good idea, and it’s quite a good idea, and I know four really clever people, and then I share it with them, then the odds are higher by getting four clever people, or four people I trust, to be involved, it’s gonna be somehow better than I could do on my own. Now why do I need to prove I can do it on my own when it’s not gonna be as good or as useful to other people? The old way was, to try and claim individual genius.
D: That’s the academic’s way, at least.
G P-O: [continuing] But a), it’s not the most efficient method, and b) it’s not glamorous to be narcissistic like that.
D: [laughing] And c), it’s not as much fun!
G P-O: When I did Contemporary Artists (1977), I’d written these questionnaires to the thousand ‘most important’ artists in the last century, and they would write back, and one of the things asked was what were their influences. Most people would say ‘oh I was influenced by meeting this person or reading that book,’ but once in a while you would get somebody who would say, ‘Nothing.’ They would basically say ‘I am just so brilliant and I have this God-given talent that’s MINE ALONE, and NOTHING influenced me.’ That’s ridiculous! Everything that happens to us every second is influencing everything else. That’s the new way. That’s what we’ve taught ourselves.
D: Right, and to be open to that is to be open to being a great artist for this century, and to be closed to that is for an artist die.
G P-O: It’s also just being modern. There’s the old way, which is all about individual ego, individual power, individual self-gratification and so on. It‘s over. Just geographically, there’s too many people now. You’ve GOT to learn to get on with each other. We’re pushed up against each other, that’s why there’s friction right now. There’s a lot of individual universes clustered here, and they’ve got to start to not trying to keep maintaining that little separation, they’ve got to start becoming, if you like, instead of atoms and molecules, instead of molecules, something else. So, as we’re more and more able to go smaller in terms of what we observe with science in a literal sense, we have to, funnily enough, get bigger in terms of us as beings.
Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, will be published by Crown in April, 2003. A deluxe boxed 24-CD edition of Throbbing Gristle’s 24 Hours of TG has just been released by Mute. A new Throbbing Gristle compilation will be released in early 2003.
For more information on Douglas Rushkoff, visit http://www.rushkoff.com/
For more information on Genesis P-Orridge, visit http://www.genesisbreyerporridge.com/
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF and GENESIS P-ORRIDGE conversation (2003)
As originally published in Arthur No. 2 (Jan 2003), with accompanying photography by Shawn Mortensen…
‘The whole planet is the museum!’
Author-theorist Douglas Rushkoff takes tea and talks shop with veteran mindboggler/conceptualist/artist/visionary Genesis P-Orridge, best known for his work as co-founder of seminal industrial outfit Throbbing Gristle and leader of neo-primitive-shamanic ravists Psychic TV
I met Genesis in the early ’90s in the Bay Area. He needed a lift to Timothy Leary’s house in Beverly Hills, and I needed an interview for a book I was writing about viral media. We spent about six hours in the car together, trying to impress one another with our strangest thoughts while Gen’s two daughters fought in the back seat.
We’ve been friends ever since.
I guess it’s about ten years later, now. I’ve gotten married, become an author and university professor, while Gen has been kicked out of the UK forever, gotten divorced and married again, replaced his teeth with gold ones, and done some other stuff to his body that I’d be scared to. Still, in spite of our outward differences, we’re on the same path, and often use one another for guidance along the way.
See, if you’re going to be an artist or writer or magician, you’ve got to navigate through some treacherous zones. If you’re not traversing new territory (or at least forgotten territory) then why write instead of just reading? And many of these regions and be culturally, intellectually, physically, and psychically challenging. Disorientation can’t be avoided—it is the rule. Panic is the thing you have to watch out for.
So, Gen and I have these long talks every month or so. Sometimes they’re data dumps, and sometimes they’re progress reports. This one is probably a little more the latter, coming as it does on the release of Gen’s new book, Painful but Fabulous: The Lives & Art of Genesis P-Orridge (Soft Skull Shortwave). —Douglas Rushkoff
Dougas Rushkoff (DR): Your new book has served for me as an occasion to look back on the history of cut-and-paste, as well as its tremendous influence on art and culture every since. Cut-and-paste can even be understood as a first, rebellious step towards the attainment of genuine co-authorship. From a broad, historical perspective, it seems to me that we move through three stages. We begin by passively absorbing the information that’s fed to us—the datastream. Then, maybe with the Protestant Reformation and the printing press, we gained the ability to interpret this information for ourselves, to some extent. Then, with cut and paste, we achieve the ability to take what’s been presented to us and move it around a little bit. We can create new meanings through transpositions of what’s there, but that’s limited, in a sense, to a kind of satire or self-conscious juxtaposition. And now, finally, with computing and the internet, with the ability to actually author what for lack of a better word would be ‘original’ material, now we move into artistry. But a truly interesting moment was that first cut-and-paste moment, that first moment of, “Okay this is being fed to us, BUT we can do this with it, or to it, and get something else.” I’d be interested in hearing from you what was it like to be part of that moment.
Genesis P-Orridge (G P-O): Well… The preamble would be this: in the early ‘60s, somewhat parallel to my becoming aware of the beatniks, I started to discover Dada and Surrealism. The first time I’d heard of cut n paste, I think was Brion Gysin giving Raoul Hausman and one or two of the Dadaists the credit as one of his inspirations. He said they would cut up words from one of their poems, putting them in a hat, and then they’d draw words out of the hat, and make a new poem. What had happened was that more emotionally based artists, the ones who were actually involved in feeling human as well as just glorifying creativity, had become very disconnected from the concept of linearity, the concept of Reason, all the material concepts of the world. They had just experienced the first world war, which had led to this Armageddon, this hell on earth, and this was their reaction against what they saw as that war’s cause: the misplaced celebration of Reason, the control over information and culture in society, the harmful repression of irrationality, which has backfired.
That’s really where the first step came, that disconnection from, and obsession with, a finished, perfect result that was ‘owned’ by the artist that made it. One of Brion Gysin’s greatest poems, which I didn’t understand until very recently, was ‘Poets don’t own words.” He would do a permutation: “Poets don’t own words, words poets don’t own, own words poets don’t” and it was only recently that I actually experienced it in a visceral way, that that’s been the big change. This is what you’re talking about: that we are blessed, or gifted, or pushed, by various events to deal with the information that’s coming at us, and that society and culture are, if you like, a solidity that’s based on the inertia and linearity. This solidity is oppressive, and in order to even begin to be anything one might label ‘free’ or ‘liberated, you have to, as Burroughs used to put it, ‘First you have to short-circuit control.’ Because control is ultimately an oppressor. Control really does contain all the feedback loops of consumer culture that you’ve talked about so astutely.
I’m know I’m going in a weird loop here, but basically the point is that during the middle of the last century, the idea of having to be an Artist who owned each thing fell apart. The Dadaists did live events. They did collaborations. They did The Exquisite Corpse, where they would do a drawing, fold it, next person would draw some more, fold it, and then the result was the art. And of course no one could say with any of these activities, ‘I did that.’ They all did it, but it also made itself. That process intrigued the more interesting artists from then on.
Now, it’s always good to look at what’s happening parallel to the art world in science at the time, whether it’s called ‘alchemy, or ‘science’ or ‘physics.’ Here, the big moment, really, is just after the Second World War, when we learnt to split the atom and we also learned to split consciousness with psychedelics at almost exactly the same time. Then you had people like Brion Gysin and William Burroughs learning to split the cultural atom with cut-ups in a much more methodical and conscientious way. Instead of it being a reaction against the Horror, it was actually a considered and very carefully and very meticulously observed process of… Well, in a sense they challenged themselves: How do we short-circuit linearity and control? Let’s experiment, and let’s be methodical, let’s CHOP THINGS UP—just like a scientist would!—and see what the building blocks are. And in their case of course, the thing to chop up would be language. So they started to chop up words.
I came in around this point, where suddenly it’s ALL up for grabs. I was born in 1950, so in 1960 I’m ten: my mind’s beginning to really think, make thought processes as well as just observe and absorb, and so I was really blessed in that the material world, the world of consciousness, and the world of accepted forms of writing and painting and music, all suddenly came up for grabs. They all became malleable. To many people, the rulebooks were thrown out. I don’t think it’s just coincidental—I think that it was a very important evolutionary moment, that we still haven’t fully grasped. As you said, it’s TOTALLY affected the culture on every possible level—on television all the adverts are just cut-ups!—to degrees that most people haven’t even considered yet.
I was being educated in an English public school and the basic bumper sticker for those is, We’re building the leaders of tomorrow. The ‘leaders of tomorrow’ were supposed to be the shepherds and farmers of inertia: to maintain the status quo, the Establishment. There was a book that came out that was called The Shock of the New. [pausing] Let me think about what it felt like. I’m just trying to track back. I remember, this seems weird to say this, I remember the Cuban missile crisis. I remember going to school, being told, You may not come home tonight because there might be an atomic war. And I was on a bus, with my face on the window of the bus, and I suddenly imagined the glass just melting around my face. I imagined there being an explosion, and the result of that being me, enfolded in molten glass, preserved in this shell of molten atomic glass. That image somehow simultaneously suggested the idea of preserving oneself, and that the shell that is oneself is invisible and transparent, and that in fact everything I’d been told about reality just wasn’t true. [laughing] Don’t ask me why that image made that happen for me! But that was my epiphany, and that was when I decided to seek out alternative methods of reporting upon experience.
In a way, I think that what we’ve always looked for is methods and media and techniques to report back upon what experience is and what being alive is. And as social life and civilization and Western Culture, which is what I know, as they have developed and become more and more complex, you would think that that implies we would be seeing some kind of shimmering atomic kaleidoscope that would be really vibrant and exciting, and constantly getting more complex. But the irony is that Western civilization seems to be more and more like threads binding rather than atomic splitting.
So what happened was, I was given a tape recorder by somebody at around the same time. Because I had very little tape, it just became natural to go back and use the tape more than once. It didn’t take long to notice that as I used it, I got these weird intersections of sound. So, on my own, by a mixture of poverty and desire, I discovered that I could actually change the order of time and reality and information. And it was exciting. I started to look for other ways of describing what I was feeling, because what I was being told was a description of being alive and reality just didn’t fit what I was feeling. As I said, I came across the Surrealists, the Dadaists and the Beatniks. At that time, it was not well documented that the beatniks were cutting up and pasting. But because of my own experiments and these little bits of information from the Dadaists, when I did see little references to tape recorder experiments, it had a really profound resonance for me, and I started to seek out all the information I could, and later on get to know the Beats too. And at the same time I started getting involved with all the underground press and so on.
What you really end up doing is, you surrender to the idea of oblivion. At some point you have to wipe absolutely clean every preconception that’s given to you both by the senses and by the culture—the ‘datastream’ that you talk about. You have to actually at some point dismiss it totally, and then you can start to make choices about what you wish to allow back in.
DR: I have always understood the kinds of shifts you’re talking about as the same kind of shift in perspective that occurs through a full-fledged renaissance. If you look back at the original “capital-R” Renaissance, what do you really have going on there? Perspective painting, successful circumnavigation of the globe, the printing press, calculus, and then the sonnet (which is really just an extended metaphor). Each of these 15th-cenutry innovations is all about being able to see three dimensions where there had formerly been two—or being able to relate two dimensions to three as in calculus, or being able to go around the globe, which is to experience the planet as three-dimensional rather than as flat. That’s renaissance . And we’re going through a similar shift, now. From the 1940s to the present, you have a series of analogous innovations. Instead of being able to circumnavigate the globe, we can blow the globe up!
G P-O: [agreeing] Or go into space and look at it.
DR: Indeed, or go into space and see it from a distance—which is just another increase in perspective. Instead of the printing press, we have the Internet, which rather than just allowing the individual in his drawing room to interpret a piece of literature, enables him or her to write one and then disseminate it through the whole network. Instead of just having perspective painting which allows you to see three dimensions on two, you get the holograph, which allows you to see four dimensions on two: the bird waving its wings, or the girl winking her eye as you walk across the plate. And then instead of calculus, which allows you to relate the second dimension to the third, or the third to the fourth, you get fractals, which is about fractional dimensionality: this thing has two and three-quarters dimensions, and what does that mean? Instead of the sonnet, which gave us the extended metaphor, we get hypertext, which allows us to make anything into a metaphor for something else—it’s all potential allegory.
Now, take a look at the results of the original Renaissance and the newfound ability of people to interpret their own culture and religion. For most of Europe that meant overturning the Catholic Church. It led to the Protestant Reformation, and eventually to bloodbaths. But before then, it was an extremely positive possibility being presented—that every man can interpret religion for himself.
And we are going through something like that again, obviously at a much faster pace, between say 1940 and the year 2000. That’s why we’ve had all these ideologies passing through until very recently—this increased amount of dimensionality, this sense of ‘Anything goes, so what do we want to bring back in?’ Which is what happens during any Renaissance. It’s as if a renaissance is a moment of shift in dimensional perspective which allows for the implantation of a new idea. Renaissance means you’re going to have a rebirth. Literally, a “renaissance,” or re-birth, of old ideas in a new context. What do we want to let back in? There’s a bit of a battle over ideas, over which ideas are going to make it back in now that everyone has the ability to re-frame this thing. Maybe what we’re in now, in the 21st century, is this struggle over authorship, this struggle over story, this global debate over narrative. In other words, whose narrative is going to be used as the template for the next several centuries or more?
G P-O: And of course the answer is no one owns the narrative anymore. That’s the thing that’s disturbing and frightening so many people, is the displacement of ownership in a very, very fundamental way.
DR: It’s a sense of ‘We won. But: uh-oh.’
G P-O: Well yeah, because even DNA is no longer a finite fixed program. DNA was once God’s book, you know. Well, now we can engineer the genetic book, the thing that’s the nearest we have to a source book of the ‘intended unfolding.’ There is no longer a fixed unfolding. For the first time we’ve actually almost surprised ourselves. Instead of us looking in the mirror, the mirror has literally dissolved. Maybe that’s what that glass was about! That metaphor.
The point you’re making is absolutely right. I was looking at the television just yesterday on the news and there was a person from a Muslim country and they were talking and they said, ‘Well you’ll never understand because you’re all Christian.’ And their assumption is still that the narrative in the West is ultimately a linear narrative that has an author, that its an unfolding linear story; and that if you’re not Muslim, you must be Christian, and that your whole behavior is based upon Christian dogma, because theirs is based on their dogma. So, for this Muslim, that’s obviously that’s the problem: it‘s Muslim dogma versus Christian dogma.
But the problem isn’t that at all. The problem is that we in the ‘West,’ are in their sense, amoral. We don’t care! Most people over here DON’T CARE what religion people are, and most people in the West don’t label themselves ‘Christians’ or anything else. The majority in the West are irreligious. They don’t have a faith. I’m not saying that’s a good thing—I’m saying it’s a fact. They’re a godless people. And in a sense, maybe, God is supposed to be ‘The Author.’ In the past, God was the ‘ultimate author.’ Well, guess what? We always said we wanted to challenge god and be like god—and now we have! We’ve just fallen, you know? [laughs] It’s as if the story of the fallen angel—Lucifer—has just happened. In a way, we’ve just started to reap the rewards of having decided to ask the questions.
DR: [agreeing] Right. Lately, I’ve started to wonder, ‘What if the painful truth is that we really are a fungus on a rock, hurtling through cold and meaningless space?’
G P-O: [laughs] Oh, I think about that every day!
DR: To me, it doesn’t really matter, because just as easily as the idea that God could have created us with meaning, is the possibility that just as life emerged from this cold and meaningless rock, and that meaning can now emerge…from us!
G P-O: I absolutely agree with you. This is our great opportunity to grow up as a species, and stop being larval. Because ultimately I think we’re still in a larval, primitive stage. Because there’s no other excuse for the way that we treat each other. If this isn’t primitive and pathetic and early behavior, then as a species we really are in trouble!
DR: And just as it’s a painful moment for any child to realize that his parents aren’t gods, it’s a painful moment for a civilization to realize that its god is not a parent.
G P-O: And that it’s actually making itself.
DR: Right. We are the adults here. We are in charge.
G P-O:Hence, it is painful—but fabulous. And that, in a way, is the whole point of the book. That’s why it’s not written just by me. This is dealt with in the book. What happened was, it became impossible for me to make a book that was both by me and about me, because I don’t even know if ‘me’ exists. And whoever ‘me’ is, is shifting and changing too—because one of things I’ve done is cut-and-pasted identity. I’ve taken it even further, you know?
DR: I ran into the same problem in my own SoftSkull book too [the novel Exit Strategy, published earlier this year], which is that if I’m writing a book about our ability to co-author the reality in which we live, how can I do that as a solitary author? So I had to put it online and let people contribute live to it.
G P-O: I think that’s one of the ONLY authentic and the nearest to an honest answer with any integrity is that you have to actually surrender to the fact that we’re in a moment where there is no need for genius to be individualized. Also, it’s not that healthy for it to be individualized because it continues this hierarchy thing. Hierarchical society means injustice, it means that certain numbers of people will follow other people and do damage based upon sort of an unthinking state of mind. So we’re at this amazing point where we have to actually say that no particular person has answers. It’s a collaborative effort.
You’ve always said, and we’ve agreed, that what goes on in art is usually the metaphor for what’s REALLY going on. So when you do an open source book, or I find it impossible to assemble a book about my art that isn’t done by a collective, at the end of it all I can say is, ‘Well, the art is actually the fact.’ Everybody did the book, and the rest is kind of the evidence that that happened, but that’s not the stuff. The pieces of art aren’t the art anymore. It really is the process of not just making it, which is the earlier idea that we had in the art world, but now it actually, truly is the process of Being that’s the only thing that really has any integrity right now.
DR: Talking the talk IS walking the walk.
G P-O: It’s just the classic conundrum which is, I’m using words to describe the fact that they’re useless. Of course, the response to that has always been, ‘But there’s such joy in talking about it.’ [laughter] And then you get back to the cut-up, of course. BECAUSE we’re so aware that, especially in a linear way, language has become this controlling factor–that every word is loaded with meaning and history, that each word is a hologram, and each hologram has all kinds of hidden agendas from all the people who have utilized it–
DR: Your language is an incantation, whether you realize it or not–
G P-O: Absolutely, so how you, at least to some degree, protect yourself and give yourself space to breathe and consider the moment, is to break those patterns that you’ve inherited, and surprise your own holograms. What I mean is this: From the moment of being able to hear words, my nervous system has been trained to an English language program in England, which of course would be different to my body and nervous system being trained in America with the English language. So I’ve got this incredibly inert, inherited, and not self-determined nervous system, that is on a day-to-day basis primarily it expresses and receives information with language, in terms of functioning with other beings. And that makes me very vulnerable because I didn’t pick that program or language! So how can I get some kind of independence from that program? It’s almost like doing karate with a blindfold on, rather than with your eyes open, because… If you’re in a cave, and it’s completely dark, and you know three people are going to attack you, and you have your eyes open, part of you is distracted by, still trying to see the enemy. But if you actually put the blindfold on in the dark, you wouldn’t think about seeing! And you might just hear that tiny bit better that might save your life.
It’s that kind of analogy, that the cut-up gives you that breathing space, in a sense a moment for survival as an intelligent and autonomous being. For me. So, if you take all the words and cut them all up and give yourself the opportunity to have these unexpected collisions, to have things revealed that you would just have forgot, filtered out, were lazy about and so on. It is just SO radical when you start to do it. The sense of empowerment and freedom from expectation…
DR: When you do it consciously—dis-assembly, re-assembly, compression—it’s almost identical to creating a sigil. [A sigil is a picture used in magical incantations. Like the symbols we use for letters, today, they are composed of drawings and symbols that are condensed into simpler sets of lines that can be remembered and meditated upon.]
G P-O: That’s true, and there’s a whole section in the book all about creating sigils, and some of the possibilities of them.
DR: The strange thing about the sigils is not so much hearing about them or figuring out how they function, but the almost-always surprising truth that they WORK.
G P-O: Yes. [laughter] This is mind-boggling, isn’t it?
DR: I don’t believe in magick, exactly. But I know that sigils work, if they’re created the right way. And sometimes they work so well that they almost come back at you as a joke. Like Grant Morrison was telling me about this big sigil that he wanted to meet Superman, and he was sitting on a park bench and Superman walked up. But it was a guy working at a convention! He treated him like he was Superman, though, and had a great interview. So sometimes it’s obviously not going to be that magical, in the sense of a puff of smoke or something. And obviously if you pick something too specific, you end up getting it, which can be scary.
G P-O: As they say, be careful what you wish for! It’s like the genie-in-the-bottle thing, isn’t it? You’ve got your wishes, except with sigils you get more than three.
DR: Right. And you can work sigil magick completely though language I suppose, but it affects realms way beyond the linguistic ones.
G P-O: Oh yeah. Well, it’s the whole Butterfly-in-the-West Indies thing, isn’t it? I think what’s really important is, if you make a decision to work within life, you let go of the scientific concept of matter being only objects. You see that culture is a material, and that language is a material, and that time is a material, and emotions are material. Basically you think of everything in terms of matter, and all matter is ultimately flexible, fluid, manipulatable and malleable. (Of course, as science and physics goes on, it keeps on confirming everything that we’ve speculated anyway. There’s not been any dissent yet about this, from what I’ve looked at in scientific.) If you start to cut things up and re-assemble them, at first it’s kind of fun. You go, Well ooo that’s nice. But it really does seem to be more than that—cut-and-paste seems to be one of the few practical ways that any person can use to truly re-wire the inherited neural system and the DNA program. You can re-wire what you were given.
DR: That’s why for me the open-source software movement is such a terrific allegory and practice for accepting the fact that we live in a malleable reality. Or certainly for accepting that a hell of a lot more of our world is programmable software than we’ve previously thought. There might be some hardware down there somewhere, but we haven’t got close to that yet. People are starting to accept that they have indeed been the programmers, whether they were witting or not, and that they’re actively programming the world we live in. I think it’s healthy for people to realize this. I think that then they start to experience everything—from their bodies to the air we breathe—as a medium through which they can create and transmit their story.
G P-O: Absolutely. Well you know that Burroughs and Gysin used to say, In a pre-recorded universe, who made the first recording? I’ve thought about that a lot. And what it led me to wasn’t so much wondering about that question, because I think you’re right, it doesn’t matter, actually, but what it did make me realize is that the entire planet is a recording device. That, as you and I are speaking now, on this planet, there is, certainly it seems that way, and we’ll probably find more, there’s some kind of data recorded—whether it be fossils, geological strata—
DR: [laughing]: Or the digital cassette that we’re recording on right now.
G P-O: —basically everything that’s happened so far is still here, recorded. On the planet, and in the planet. And there are people in New Guinea living in different centuries to the ones we’re living in. The people in the Kalahari are living in the pre-Stone Ages. So we actually still have the pre-Stone Age, parallel to the next phase, which is, because some people in the West and Japan and so on, high-tech societies, are already in the future, so allllllll the realities humanity has programmed through history are still here simultaneously! We’re actually layering more on top. So what we really have is a point of intersection, which is the earth, and everything that’s ever been manifested is still here. That’s not just a concept, this is actually HOW IT IS.
I mean, I walk down the street and if I meet somebody that I know who’s from Nepal, I also quite deliberately through my own interest, I remember I’m talking to somebody who’s from a different century, in terms of where they grew up. That doesn’t mean anything in terms of their intelligence! I have to remind myself that there’s ALL these stories happening simultaneously, all the stories are unfolding simultaneously. Each individual being, walking by, is the center of their own particular universe, in terms of subjectivity. You’re the only person who’ll be in your world every second that your world exists. And your world is all the things you perceive while you are—theoretically—‘alive.’ And that is your unique universe, because you do go out into what’s out there just the same as I do. So this place is just amazing, because there’s billions of universe clustered on this point of intersection, and all the stories going right back are still here too! We have trillions and trillions of universes, many of them mobile, because they’re in human bodies, all clustered in these tiny, tiny concentrated places.
DR: That’s why the real artistic act is not one of authorship but one of resonance. You know, being open to these conversations…
G P-O: Yes, it’s remaining open to dialogue. It’s not about the ego—look at me, I’m a great artist, I have something in the Tate, you know? That is SO redundant. Museums? THIS IS THE MUSEUM! The whole planet is the museum! I call all of that The Museum of Magic, because it’s all about illusion. That’s the whole illusion.
We really are in a new place. And as people kind of grasped almost immediately, the Internet is, they knew it would be a metaphor, but it’s actually also a reality. Yes, we are actually building some kind of new brain. A global brain, as Howard [Howard K. Bloom, author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000)] would call it. That’s actually going on. These AREN’T abstractions.
That’s the thing that I think that we’ve got to get hold of.
DR: What words of encouragement would you have for the passionate but still currently amateur and underappreciated young artist who might be reading ARTHUR at this moment, who makes her cut-up tapes and homespun zines and online blogs, and yet there’s not anyone willing to pay for what she has to say, not that many people coming. But this person feels she’s resonating with everything that you’re saying now, or might be saying in one of your books…
G P-O: Well… In doing this book, I had to go right back to childhood and look at my entire unfolding so far, as a character. I had to look at everything. And one thing that immediately struck me as significant is that I’ve always worked in collectives. I’ve never had this need, or this motivation, to identify myself as the sole source of anything. ‘Oh, it’s because I’m clever that this happened.’ No. All the time I say, over and over again, we just did what was inevitable anyway. And that’s the important thing, is the people should LET GO of the concept of success and celebrity and fame and fortune. That’s not important. Of course we’d all love to have whatever it might be that represents for us–which is mainly not worrying about bills, for me! I think that although Warhol was wonderful, he did us all a great disservice by making celebrity into this red herring. And I think that people will find that if they just, as I used to say, ‘change your own bedroom and you can change the world.’ It’s about self-discovery and it’s about collaboration and collective action, WITHOUT any kind of narcissistic, secret agenda. That’s over. You know, sometimes someone for whatever reason happens to be chosen to represent a collective metaphor, as a person. That’s why I chose a fictional character, Genesis P-Orridge, in the first place. Neil Megson is the artist, not Genesis. Neil Megson created this fictional character, and then let loose that character to see if it was true that you could cut and paste a person, and what would happen if you put a truly flexible and malleable being out there.
D: But ‘Genesis’ is still the author of the book.
G P-O: Actually I don’t think it says that. I think if you look it doesn’t say that at all. It says it’s by everyone else.
D: Oh, right. “With text by…”
G P-O: Yeah. See?
D: Well, Neil’s not on there.
G P-O: No, but he’s discussed in one chapter. So no, I don’t put myself as the author. I’m not the author. I’m blessed to have let other people do it for me! [laughs] This is an open-source book, see? I said to everybody, Look you’ve got carte blanche for once, no one’s gonna censor you, you can use me as an excuse to say something you’ve always wanted to say, I don’t care, I don’t have to agree with you, use ‘Genesis P-Orridge’ the idea to say whatever you want, and if you need Genesis P-Orridge the idea to trigger something, feel free. And that’s basically how the book happened, as you know. And that’s why I love it so much. Because I got to see it happen too. I was just as much of a witness as anyone who reads it. And of course truly I do feel incredibly humbled and honored by the amount of positive energy that people gave me based around this character, that they HAVE found that something was useful for them. And at the end, the last page says, ‘To be continued.’ For the very reason that this isn’t over, this is an ongoing thing. I don’t know the end. That’s why there’s all these different faces in there. Which one is me? I don’t know. Funny thing is none of those is how I look now, so…
It’s all about letting go of those preconceptions, and not being afraid to not exist in a sense, because even as you are theoretically here and present, you still don’t really know if you exist. It’s incredibly liberating when you let go of that need, and let yourself become fictional–as well as knowing you’re fictional. Because actually we all are fictions. We’re all just stories unfolding.
D: And until you accept that you’re fictional, you don’t stand a chance of writing your own story. You get too bogged down.
G P-O: In answer to that question, then, with those people, right, that you want me to encourage them. However this may sound, this is the basic exercise I’ve used. First of all is the classic Sufi thing, which is ‘Always try to go to sleep feeling that the day you’ve just had, something extra was added into the word’—something that you’re proud of, or pleased about. It may be that you cleaned a room. Or you wrote a nice postcard to a friend. Or made a phone call to Mum. It doesn’t have to be grand. Something happened that day, that wouldn’t’ve happened without you being alive, something that is somehow to you a positive thing. Feed the dog, stroke it, whatever. That’s one thing to do. The other exercise is to be able to think at any moment during the day, whenever you’re doing something… like if you’re writing a letter, think to yourself, ‘If I died now, and my life was judged by what this letter is like, would I be proud of that?’ Do EVERYTHING as if that so meticulously, make it so full of passion and of love for the moment and for the thing that you’re doing, so that you would always be proud to be remembered by that thing. Whatever it is, whether it’s cooking for a friend, washing up, anything. To always feel honorable and proud and that you’ve given love back by the way that you act every day.
And then another exercise is this: Imagine your life is a book, and you’re going to write this book. So when you’re thinking, What should I do? Should I have this relationship or not? or something, you can think in terms of would doing that make for an interesting chapter. Even now sometimes I sit back with Miss Jackie and go, There’s another good page in the book. [laughs] The Theoretical Autobiography that I could never write because it’s too much stuff, but… It’s a good exercise, to just go ‘Well yeah, that was a good bit of the book.’ Sometimes it’s ‘Well that was dramatic, but that was a good bit of the book too.’ Or, ‘That was terrible, oh, argh, but it’ll look great in the book.’ Or if you want to get more contemporary, you can imagine your life as a movie: ‘Was that a good scene?’
Suddenly you will find more balance. The great ups and the great downs start to become the coloring of the story—they start to have their own special value and emotional joy, because it’s YOUR story and it’s your passion and it’s your tragedy and it’s your moment of adulation. It’s your moment of…whatever. All these wonderful emotional events that take place that make us more individual than anything else–those are always wonderful, no matter how hard they are to experience. And that’s the other thing, the other trick: always try to work with other people, because none of us know everything. My feeling is, if I can have one good idea, and it’s quite a good idea, and I know four really clever people, and then I share it with them, then the odds are higher by getting four clever people, or four people I trust, to be involved, it’s gonna be somehow better than I could do on my own. Now why do I need to prove I can do it on my own when it’s not gonna be as good or as useful to other people? The old way was, to try and claim individual genius.
D: That’s the academic’s way, at least.
G P-O: [continuing] But a), it’s not the most efficient method, and b) it’s not glamorous to be narcissistic like that.
D: [laughing] And c), it’s not as much fun!
G P-O: When I did Contemporary Artists (1977), I’d written these questionnaires to the thousand ‘most important’ artists in the last century, and they would write back, and one of the things asked was what were their influences. Most people would say ‘oh I was influenced by meeting this person or reading that book,’ but once in a while you would get somebody who would say, ‘Nothing.’ They would basically say ‘I am just so brilliant and I have this God-given talent that’s MINE ALONE, and NOTHING influenced me.’ That’s ridiculous! Everything that happens to us every second is influencing everything else. That’s the new way. That’s what we’ve taught ourselves.
D: Right, and to be open to that is to be open to being a great artist for this century, and to be closed to that is for an artist die.
G P-O: It’s also just being modern. There’s the old way, which is all about individual ego, individual power, individual self-gratification and so on. It‘s over. Just geographically, there’s too many people now. You’ve GOT to learn to get on with each other. We’re pushed up against each other, that’s why there’s friction right now. There’s a lot of individual universes clustered here, and they’ve got to start to not trying to keep maintaining that little separation, they’ve got to start becoming, if you like, instead of atoms and molecules, instead of molecules, something else. So, as we’re more and more able to go smaller in terms of what we observe with science in a literal sense, we have to, funnily enough, get bigger in terms of us as beings.
Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, will be published by Crown in April, 2003. A deluxe boxed 24-CD edition of Throbbing Gristle’s 24 Hours of TG has just been released by Mute. A new Throbbing Gristle compilation will be released in early 2003.
For more information on Douglas Rushkoff, visit http://www.rushkoff.com/
For more information on Genesis P-Orridge, visit http://www.genesisbreyerporridge.com/
Friday, May 28, 2010
Douglas Rushkoff's interactive media studies Spring 2010 course
Special thanks to Douglas Rushkoff http://rushkoff.com/interactive-media-studies/
(former PTV keyboardist and brillant author)
who linked to thee archive to use the "Splinter Test Essay" HERE for his students in his
interactive media studies Spring 2010 course.
2/25 Week Five: Cut and Paste
8. ‘Happenings’ in the New York Scene. Allan Kaprow, 1961
9. The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, 1961
10. Genesis P-Orridge, The Splinter Test genesisporridgearchive.blogspot.com/2009/10/splinter-test-essay.html?zx=237cd5c0bd8e1fcd
Any of Douglas's students lurking around here? Would you be interested in sharing any of your thoughts about the splinter test piece, especially if you were not familiar with it before? The splinter test essay has personally been one of my favorite works by Genesis. I would like to share any writings you had to complete for this course and what you took away from the "cut and paste week."
(former PTV keyboardist and brillant author)
who linked to thee archive to use the "Splinter Test Essay" HERE for his students in his
interactive media studies Spring 2010 course.
2/25 Week Five: Cut and Paste
8. ‘Happenings’ in the New York Scene. Allan Kaprow, 1961
9. The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, 1961
10. Genesis P-Orridge, The Splinter Test genesisporridgearchive.blogspot.com/2009/10/splinter-test-essay.html?zx=237cd5c0bd8e1fcd
Any of Douglas's students lurking around here? Would you be interested in sharing any of your thoughts about the splinter test piece, especially if you were not familiar with it before? The splinter test essay has personally been one of my favorite works by Genesis. I would like to share any writings you had to complete for this course and what you took away from the "cut and paste week."
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Various sections and T.o.p.y Chapter from Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book CYBERIA
UPDATE: what follows is a few pages of "Cyberia" that mainly deal with Genesis and T.O.P.Y...Author Douglas Rushkoff has made the entire work of "Cyberia" availiable to read on online or download here http://www.rushkoff.com/downloadables/cyberiabook/
Material from cyberia "life in the trenches of hyperspace " by Douglas Rushkoff
pgs 117-118 the origins of "Acid house" and Gen's first experience with it.
Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at thehistory of this thing called house.'' Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse)began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that--like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant--was called"house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop---influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called bites'' so (others spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''
When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast,high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labeled "acid,'' which he figured was psychedelic music--tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.
CHAPTER 12 Gardeners Ov Thee Abyss
The strength of any magic in Cyberia is directly proportional to that magic's ability to permeate the network.Like cultural viruses, the techniques of magic are thought to gain strength as they gain acceptance by larger groups of people.Computer technology fits in to cyberian spirituality in two ways: as a way to spread magic, and as a magic itself.
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth is a nett-work for the dissemination of majick (their spellings) through the culture for the purpose of human emancipation. TOPY (rhymes with soapy) began as a fan club and ideological forum for Genesis P. Orridge,founder of industrial band Throbbing Gristle and its house spin-off Psychic TV, but soon developed into a massive cultish web of majick practitioners and datasphere enthusiasts. They are the most severe example of technopaganism, consciously stretching backward through medievalism to ancient pagan spirituality and up through computer technology to the creation of a global,informational being. They predate and maybe even spawned House culture, but have remained pretty separate from the lovey-dovey,soft and squishy Ecstasy crowd.
All male initiates to TOPY take the name Coyote, and all women Kali. The name is followed by a number so that members can identify one another. Kali is the name of a female sex goddess known as the destroyer''; the coyote is found in many mythologies, usually symbolizing wisdom and an adventurous nature.
The nett-work consists of access points, or stations, which are post office boxes, fax machines, computer modems, or 800 phone numbers. Each access point gathers information from places off the web, then distributes it throughout the network, and in turn takes information from the web and makes it available to local members. As one initiate explains: The main memory can be accessed from the stations, then downloaded via correspondents through Xeroxes.'' Or, in English, someone reads his mail or plays his message machine, then types it up and gives copies to his friends. "The main memory'' refers to the TOPY idea that all its members compose a single, informational being.
The information passed about consists of majickal techniques'' from drugs and incantations to computer hardware and engineering tricks, as well as general TOPY philosophy. In someways, the entire TOPY network is really just an elaborate metaphor for the postmodern Gaian brain. The information they pass around is much less important than the way in which it is passed. TOPY documents are immediately recognizable because they spell words in obsolete or newly made-up ways. This is seen as away of retaking control of language, which has been used and abused for so long by the illegitimate power mongers of Western culture, which are directing the planet toward certain doom.
However well TOPY has permeated the net, its members rarely peep up out of the underground into the light of day and consensus reality. For all their 800-number accessibility, very few cyberians regularly socialize with flesh-and-blood TOPYmembers. It's almost as if their presence as human beings is less important than their presence as a cultural virus or informational entity.
All on the Same Side
Today, Diana is on Haight Street, distributing fliers forthe next Toon Town. Unlike most promoters, who target likely''clubgoers--kids with house-style clothes, computer-hippies,college cliques--Diana is dedicated to spreading the house phenomenon to the uninitiated. A freespirited club girl with a slight Mother Theresa complex, Diana is the female, emotional,caring counter to Toon Town's otherwise heady patriarchy,especially now that Earth Girl works at Big Heart City. Each human to whom she hands a flier is a potential link to dozens more. The more people brought in to the scene, she reasons, the more it grows, the more they grow, the further enlightened and loving the world is. This is the philosophy that got Diana to leave protective campus life at Berkeley and move into the city to promote Toon Town full-time.
When Diana approaches an unlikely cluster of young men cladin leather and army fatigues and smoking a joint in front of a record store, she unwittingly hits the networking jackpot. Her Toon Town promotional bill is grabbed up by the trio, who exchange it for a leaflet of their own, The Wheel of Torture,''a poem by Coyote 107:
EYE WAS ON THEE WHEEL OV TORTUREON THAT TABLE, I WAS SPUN LIKE AZ A VORTICE. IN AN ACT OV ATTRACTING VIOLENCE TO MY BEING. THEE VIOLENCE WAS EXPRESSED THROUGH TORTURE, WHICH BECAME AN ACT OVALCHEMICAL PROCESS. MY SENSES WERE BEING PULVERIZED. THROWN INTOSHOCK. PULVERIZATION WAS BEING SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT. EVERY OUNCE OV MY EMOTION WAS NULLIFIED. STEPPED ON AND SPIT ON. TOTALAPPLICATION OV NEGATION. TOTAL ACT OV NON SERVITUDE. REJECTING MY OWN PERSONALITY. NOT LETTING MY EGO TAKE KONTROL. VIOLATING MY OWN EGO IZ AN ACT OV KONTROL OVER IT. A REBELLION AND A REJECTION. HOPING FOR COMPLETE REVOLUTION WITHIN MYSELF AND NOTWAITING FOR THEE GENERATIONZ TO CATCH UP. (FUCK THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS! WHEN THINGS NEED TO CHANGE THEY WILL; THROUGH WILL.) THIS TYPE OV NULLIFICATION IZ THEE PROCESS OV PURIFICATION THROUGH PULVERIZATION. AN INITIATION INTO THE SELF. THE TRUESELF. NOT THEE ILLUZION OUR EGO FEEDZ US. LOSS OV EGO IZ PART OV THEE AWAKENING PROCCESS. THEE LIBERATION PROCESS. TO LIBERATEYOURSELF IZ TO NEGATE AND NULLIFY THAT WHICH RESTRICTS YOU. WHAT RESTRICTS YOU FROM EXPRESSION AND EXPLORATION. EXPLORE YOURSELF AND BE READY. BE ABLE AND CAPABLE. TRANZFORM AND COMMUNICATE. TRUE COMMUNICATION ONLY HAPPENZ BETWEEN EQUALS. YOU MUST MUTATE TO COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST SHARE VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY, WHICH IZWHAT YOU ARE. ALL LIFE IZ VIBRATION AND MOVEMENT. NOTHING IZ IN A FIXED POSITION. FIXED POSITIONS ARE ONLY TEMPORARY. TRUE STATESARE TEMPORAL BECAUSE CHANGE IZ INEVITABLE. CHANGE MAKES BALANCE. CHANGE IZ MOVEMENT. MOVEMENT IZ UNIVERSAL YET DEPENDENT AND DEFINABLE. MOVEMENT HAS VELOCITY AND DIRECTION. MOVEMENT IZ MAJICK. MAJICK IS SETTING FORTH THEE WILL INTO MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL. ALLEGORY IZ THEE VEHICAL. LEARN TO KONTROL THEE VEHICAL. GET BEHIND THE WHEEL. STEER YOUR LIFE IN THEE DIRECTION YOUCHOOSE. YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE PIT-STOPS FOR YOUR EGO.PULVERIZE & PURITY.
The majick, kontrol, and steering happen in two ways. First, the techniques and ideas spread throughout the United States and England empower individual pagans to develop their own personal strategies for moving through life. Second, and more important,the dissemination of the information itself creates a sub- oreven countercultural infrastructure. In a meta'' way, the new lines of communication create the global, informational being, inthis case based on majick and pagan technology. Unlike GreenFire, though, whose gentle androgyny is quite Disney in its softness, TOPY members are medieval-styled skinheads. Pierced lips and noses, tattoos, army clothes, spikes, leather, bizarre beards, crew cuts, shaved heads and mohawks for the men; the women dress either in sixties naturale or psychedelic partyclothes beneath heavy army coats and leather jackets.
Magick. Cool. We're into that, too,'' Diana says, looking up from the small document. Unlike most with whom the TOPYs come in contact, Diana knows that they're not punk rockers. "We have a Nutrient Cafe, a virtual reality booth, brain machines. Plus alot of good information about all those things.'' Diana's attempt at cross-culturalization opens a Pandora's box.
We're trying to achieve total control over information.''Kurt, the leader of the group, speaks with a forced eloquence,ironically counterpointing his belligerent styling. "That allows us to decontrol the imprints that are implanted within the information itself. Everyone has the right to exchange information. What flows through TOPY is occult-lit,computer-tech, shamanistic information and majick--majick as actually a technology, as a tool, or a sort of correlative technology based on intuitive will. It's an intuitive correlative technology that is used by the individual who's realized that heor she has his or her own will which they have the freedom toexercise the way they want. That's kind of how I see majick.''
To TOPYs, magic is just the realization and redirection ofthe will toward conscious ends. To do this, people must disconnect from all sources of information that attempt to program them into unconscious submission, and replace them withi nformation that opens them to their own magical and technological abilities.
While Kurt is more in your face'' and confrontational abouthis majickal designs on culture than is Green Fire or Earth Girl,Diana is confident that they all share in the basic belief that magic and spirituality are technologies that must be utilized to prepare and develop the planet for the coming age.
Well, we're all on the same side.'' She's hip to their codified lifestyle and too determined to get them to her club to let their critical tone or angry-looking fashion choices get in the way. At Berkeley there were kids plenty more strung out than these guys. Besides, if she can turn one TOPY into a Toon Towner,thousands could follow. Kurt has the same intention. Toon Town would be an excellent venue to distribute TOPY literature.
Everyone's trying to turn everyone else on to basically the same thing. Diana takes their names down for the ever-expanding guest list (Preston won't be happy about that) and moves on.
The Protocol of Empathy
Back at Kurt's apartment later that day, the group preparesto go to Toon Town for the evening. They'll check out the club,it's decided, and give out some of their latest propaganda. A new member of the group--a runaway teenager who was found at a concert last weekend--wonders why everyone is so preoccupied withspreading the word. Kurt is quick to answer him.
That's what TOPY's always existed for: to help people realize that this society is in a crisis point. People have towake up instead of sleeping in front of the TV, which is a window on information which you don't even realize is subliminal `cause the intentions aren't even known to all the people.''
Kurt's tiny black-and-white television set has the word virus scrawled across its screen in indelible marker, a constant reminder to all viewers that the media is carrying potentially infectious subliminal ideas.
It's the programming that's dangerous. The television networks create programs which program the reality of the viewer.Each viewer is defined by nothing more than his programming.''
So, TOPY members replace regular, power-depleting television programming with information of their own: magick.
Majick is a map of the external reality. Pagans who've understood that throughout history have stayed away from the church, and used the occult as a type of underground communication. Symbols which were agreed upon.''
The revelation of the subcultural lattice work vanishes as Kurt's girlfriend suddenly enters.
I got an electric shock,'' she announces, with a certainamount of wonderment in relating the incident. "And it made my finger go numb. I was plugging in my hair dryer to the socket,and my finger's numb. I don't know what to do! It hurts like hell. I mean, it doesn't hurt at all, but ... I got shocked and it affected me.''
Do you have any cigarettes, Kim?'' Kurt asks her in an eventone.
Yeah,'' she answers. "Do you want one? Want some pot?''
She goes out, still staring at her thumb, to search for tobacco and/or cannabis. Although these kids are far out on a technopagan limb, their familial interactions look as traditionally patriarchal as the Bunkers. In one sense they seem to have taken cyber paganism the farthest. Their model of the human being is really that of the computer with will. But in another way, they appear to have adopted a more sexist and radically traditional value system than their parents could have had. The Coyotes have all become pack animals, roaming thestreets for adventure, while the Kalis stay at home, shop for clothes, or mix potions.
When Kurt does get to the topic of socializing, he speaks about it in a language more suited to computer modem protocol than human interaction:
When computers talk, there's a basic hand shake that happens between two terminals. The computer is analogous to the human biosystem, or a neural linguistic coalitive technological system.'' Kim sits up on Kurt's knee as he continues. She lights Kurt's cigarette for him and puts it into his mouth.
Empathy is caused by frequencies being shared by people, and when they interlock their frequencies, they cause a certain level of syncopation. The closer that that level of syncopationis together, the closer that those frequencies are locked in the higher level of communication that you're experiencing. Interlocking can happen in what we now call protocol: the terms that are agreed by the two users.''
The highest level of protocol between two users is, of course, sexual intercourse, an act of creativity that TOPYmembers are trying to demystify. Since they see sex as the connective energy in all interactions, the word of has been replaced in TOPY-spell by the word ov, representative of ovum,''the sexual energy, which needs to be liberated from society's restrictions and reintegrated with the will. In a practical sense, this means using the sexual energy for the practice of majick.
Your dick is majick wand if you know how to use it,'' one roommate loves to say. As another of the many leaflets around the house insists in block type:
We are thee gardeners ov thee abyss. Working to reclaim a strangled paradise choked with unwilled weeds, subconscious manifestations ov fear and self-hate. We embrace this fear and our shadow to assimilate all that we think we are not. Realigning ourselves on thee lattice ov power. Change is our strength. We turn the soil to expose thee roots ov ourconditioned behavioral responses. Identifying and dissimilatingthe thought structures that blind us ov our beauty and imprison us from our power. We thrash these weeds beyond recognition, beyond meaning, beyond existence to the consistency of nothingness. Returning them to their origin,thee abyss. Thee fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration. in coum-union, we impregnate thee abyss; thee omninada; thee all nothingness, with thee seed ov creation.Cultivating, through will and self-love, thee infinite beauty and love that is Creation.
The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzikconsiders the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see the light. The fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration,'' because an acknowledgment of the unconscious programming and darkness within us opens the possibility fortheir obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressingthem turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl disasters, or worse. Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic.They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.
Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it,he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:
I can positively describe that experience as making love with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful experience of life.''
Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik paint. Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.
Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys,whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous.She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''
The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror anddisdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with a wide smile: Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow andshe loves every minute of it!''
As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece: Fucking art critics!''
SECTION OF CHAPTER 13
Coyote 1
The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based nett-work even further. "Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founderGenesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to create an even more violently anti brainwashing style of song writing than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle,was the first major industrial band, and even his current industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sound sto deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:
We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that,instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns andstructures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity and minimum discontent.''
Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status quo. This motivated them to create what they called "metabolic'' music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques werenecessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds,and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using thecomputer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the new sound was unpleasant--so much so that they considered it a"nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested in affecting the body directly through the textures of his soundsthan he was in making any aesthetic statement throughentertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.
The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into theeffects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis of their ability to decondition social restraints on thought andthe body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important thatlisteners understood what was happening to them any more than it was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram theaudience in any way available.
For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project, Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak andthe societal values it supports. The music still contains deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works andenjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures.Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This creates what Orridge calls a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and followers--through self-consciously cut-and-paste house music--that the technologies in place around them can be successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure thatnurtures it.''
Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assaul ton programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to reevaluate his purchases: Did I buy that because I wanted it, or was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged.Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly through the sound technology:
We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now.You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing,which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring combinations of sounds and sources as well.''
Material from cyberia "life in the trenches of hyperspace " by Douglas Rushkoff
pgs 117-118 the origins of "Acid house" and Gen's first experience with it.
Let's leave Toon Town for a moment to get a look at thehistory of this thing called house.'' Most Americans say it began in Chicago, where DJs at smaller, private parties and membership-only clubs (particularly one called The Warehouse)began aggressively mixing records, adding their own electronic percussion and sampling tracks, making music that--like the home-made vinaigrette at an Italian restaurant--was called"house.'' The fast disco and hip-hop---influenced recordings would sample pieces of music that were called bites'' so (others spell it "bytes,'' to indicate that these are digital samples that can be measured in terms of RAM size). Especially evocative bites were called acid bites.'' Thus, music of the house, made up of these acid bites, became known as "acid house.''
When this sound got to England, it was reinterpreted, along with its name. Folklore has it that industrial (hard, fast,high-tech, and psychedelic) music superstar Genesis P. Orridge was in a record store when he saw a bin of disks labeled "acid,'' which he figured was psychedelic music--tunes to play while on LSD. He and his cohorts added their own hallucinogenic flavor to the beats and samples, and British acid house was born.
CHAPTER 12 Gardeners Ov Thee Abyss
The strength of any magic in Cyberia is directly proportional to that magic's ability to permeate the network.Like cultural viruses, the techniques of magic are thought to gain strength as they gain acceptance by larger groups of people.Computer technology fits in to cyberian spirituality in two ways: as a way to spread magic, and as a magic itself.
Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth is a nett-work for the dissemination of majick (their spellings) through the culture for the purpose of human emancipation. TOPY (rhymes with soapy) began as a fan club and ideological forum for Genesis P. Orridge,founder of industrial band Throbbing Gristle and its house spin-off Psychic TV, but soon developed into a massive cultish web of majick practitioners and datasphere enthusiasts. They are the most severe example of technopaganism, consciously stretching backward through medievalism to ancient pagan spirituality and up through computer technology to the creation of a global,informational being. They predate and maybe even spawned House culture, but have remained pretty separate from the lovey-dovey,soft and squishy Ecstasy crowd.
All male initiates to TOPY take the name Coyote, and all women Kali. The name is followed by a number so that members can identify one another. Kali is the name of a female sex goddess known as the destroyer''; the coyote is found in many mythologies, usually symbolizing wisdom and an adventurous nature.
The nett-work consists of access points, or stations, which are post office boxes, fax machines, computer modems, or 800 phone numbers. Each access point gathers information from places off the web, then distributes it throughout the network, and in turn takes information from the web and makes it available to local members. As one initiate explains: The main memory can be accessed from the stations, then downloaded via correspondents through Xeroxes.'' Or, in English, someone reads his mail or plays his message machine, then types it up and gives copies to his friends. "The main memory'' refers to the TOPY idea that all its members compose a single, informational being.
The information passed about consists of majickal techniques'' from drugs and incantations to computer hardware and engineering tricks, as well as general TOPY philosophy. In someways, the entire TOPY network is really just an elaborate metaphor for the postmodern Gaian brain. The information they pass around is much less important than the way in which it is passed. TOPY documents are immediately recognizable because they spell words in obsolete or newly made-up ways. This is seen as away of retaking control of language, which has been used and abused for so long by the illegitimate power mongers of Western culture, which are directing the planet toward certain doom.
However well TOPY has permeated the net, its members rarely peep up out of the underground into the light of day and consensus reality. For all their 800-number accessibility, very few cyberians regularly socialize with flesh-and-blood TOPYmembers. It's almost as if their presence as human beings is less important than their presence as a cultural virus or informational entity.
All on the Same Side
Today, Diana is on Haight Street, distributing fliers forthe next Toon Town. Unlike most promoters, who target likely''clubgoers--kids with house-style clothes, computer-hippies,college cliques--Diana is dedicated to spreading the house phenomenon to the uninitiated. A freespirited club girl with a slight Mother Theresa complex, Diana is the female, emotional,caring counter to Toon Town's otherwise heady patriarchy,especially now that Earth Girl works at Big Heart City. Each human to whom she hands a flier is a potential link to dozens more. The more people brought in to the scene, she reasons, the more it grows, the more they grow, the further enlightened and loving the world is. This is the philosophy that got Diana to leave protective campus life at Berkeley and move into the city to promote Toon Town full-time.
When Diana approaches an unlikely cluster of young men cladin leather and army fatigues and smoking a joint in front of a record store, she unwittingly hits the networking jackpot. Her Toon Town promotional bill is grabbed up by the trio, who exchange it for a leaflet of their own, The Wheel of Torture,''a poem by Coyote 107:
EYE WAS ON THEE WHEEL OV TORTUREON THAT TABLE, I WAS SPUN LIKE AZ A VORTICE. IN AN ACT OV ATTRACTING VIOLENCE TO MY BEING. THEE VIOLENCE WAS EXPRESSED THROUGH TORTURE, WHICH BECAME AN ACT OVALCHEMICAL PROCESS. MY SENSES WERE BEING PULVERIZED. THROWN INTOSHOCK. PULVERIZATION WAS BEING SHOVED DOWN MY THROAT. EVERY OUNCE OV MY EMOTION WAS NULLIFIED. STEPPED ON AND SPIT ON. TOTALAPPLICATION OV NEGATION. TOTAL ACT OV NON SERVITUDE. REJECTING MY OWN PERSONALITY. NOT LETTING MY EGO TAKE KONTROL. VIOLATING MY OWN EGO IZ AN ACT OV KONTROL OVER IT. A REBELLION AND A REJECTION. HOPING FOR COMPLETE REVOLUTION WITHIN MYSELF AND NOTWAITING FOR THEE GENERATIONZ TO CATCH UP. (FUCK THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS! WHEN THINGS NEED TO CHANGE THEY WILL; THROUGH WILL.) THIS TYPE OV NULLIFICATION IZ THEE PROCESS OV PURIFICATION THROUGH PULVERIZATION. AN INITIATION INTO THE SELF. THE TRUESELF. NOT THEE ILLUZION OUR EGO FEEDZ US. LOSS OV EGO IZ PART OV THEE AWAKENING PROCCESS. THEE LIBERATION PROCESS. TO LIBERATEYOURSELF IZ TO NEGATE AND NULLIFY THAT WHICH RESTRICTS YOU. WHAT RESTRICTS YOU FROM EXPRESSION AND EXPLORATION. EXPLORE YOURSELF AND BE READY. BE ABLE AND CAPABLE. TRANZFORM AND COMMUNICATE. TRUE COMMUNICATION ONLY HAPPENZ BETWEEN EQUALS. YOU MUST MUTATE TO COMMUNICATE. YOU MUST SHARE VIBRATIONAL FREQUENCY, WHICH IZWHAT YOU ARE. ALL LIFE IZ VIBRATION AND MOVEMENT. NOTHING IZ IN A FIXED POSITION. FIXED POSITIONS ARE ONLY TEMPORARY. TRUE STATESARE TEMPORAL BECAUSE CHANGE IZ INEVITABLE. CHANGE MAKES BALANCE. CHANGE IZ MOVEMENT. MOVEMENT IZ UNIVERSAL YET DEPENDENT AND DEFINABLE. MOVEMENT HAS VELOCITY AND DIRECTION. MOVEMENT IZ MAJICK. MAJICK IS SETTING FORTH THEE WILL INTO MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL. ALLEGORY IZ THEE VEHICAL. LEARN TO KONTROL THEE VEHICAL. GET BEHIND THE WHEEL. STEER YOUR LIFE IN THEE DIRECTION YOUCHOOSE. YOU DON'T HAVE TO MAKE PIT-STOPS FOR YOUR EGO.PULVERIZE & PURITY.
The majick, kontrol, and steering happen in two ways. First, the techniques and ideas spread throughout the United States and England empower individual pagans to develop their own personal strategies for moving through life. Second, and more important,the dissemination of the information itself creates a sub- oreven countercultural infrastructure. In a meta'' way, the new lines of communication create the global, informational being, inthis case based on majick and pagan technology. Unlike GreenFire, though, whose gentle androgyny is quite Disney in its softness, TOPY members are medieval-styled skinheads. Pierced lips and noses, tattoos, army clothes, spikes, leather, bizarre beards, crew cuts, shaved heads and mohawks for the men; the women dress either in sixties naturale or psychedelic partyclothes beneath heavy army coats and leather jackets.
Magick. Cool. We're into that, too,'' Diana says, looking up from the small document. Unlike most with whom the TOPYs come in contact, Diana knows that they're not punk rockers. "We have a Nutrient Cafe, a virtual reality booth, brain machines. Plus alot of good information about all those things.'' Diana's attempt at cross-culturalization opens a Pandora's box.
We're trying to achieve total control over information.''Kurt, the leader of the group, speaks with a forced eloquence,ironically counterpointing his belligerent styling. "That allows us to decontrol the imprints that are implanted within the information itself. Everyone has the right to exchange information. What flows through TOPY is occult-lit,computer-tech, shamanistic information and majick--majick as actually a technology, as a tool, or a sort of correlative technology based on intuitive will. It's an intuitive correlative technology that is used by the individual who's realized that heor she has his or her own will which they have the freedom toexercise the way they want. That's kind of how I see majick.''
To TOPYs, magic is just the realization and redirection ofthe will toward conscious ends. To do this, people must disconnect from all sources of information that attempt to program them into unconscious submission, and replace them withi nformation that opens them to their own magical and technological abilities.
While Kurt is more in your face'' and confrontational abouthis majickal designs on culture than is Green Fire or Earth Girl,Diana is confident that they all share in the basic belief that magic and spirituality are technologies that must be utilized to prepare and develop the planet for the coming age.
Well, we're all on the same side.'' She's hip to their codified lifestyle and too determined to get them to her club to let their critical tone or angry-looking fashion choices get in the way. At Berkeley there were kids plenty more strung out than these guys. Besides, if she can turn one TOPY into a Toon Towner,thousands could follow. Kurt has the same intention. Toon Town would be an excellent venue to distribute TOPY literature.
Everyone's trying to turn everyone else on to basically the same thing. Diana takes their names down for the ever-expanding guest list (Preston won't be happy about that) and moves on.
The Protocol of Empathy
Back at Kurt's apartment later that day, the group preparesto go to Toon Town for the evening. They'll check out the club,it's decided, and give out some of their latest propaganda. A new member of the group--a runaway teenager who was found at a concert last weekend--wonders why everyone is so preoccupied withspreading the word. Kurt is quick to answer him.
That's what TOPY's always existed for: to help people realize that this society is in a crisis point. People have towake up instead of sleeping in front of the TV, which is a window on information which you don't even realize is subliminal `cause the intentions aren't even known to all the people.''
Kurt's tiny black-and-white television set has the word virus scrawled across its screen in indelible marker, a constant reminder to all viewers that the media is carrying potentially infectious subliminal ideas.
It's the programming that's dangerous. The television networks create programs which program the reality of the viewer.Each viewer is defined by nothing more than his programming.''
So, TOPY members replace regular, power-depleting television programming with information of their own: magick.
Majick is a map of the external reality. Pagans who've understood that throughout history have stayed away from the church, and used the occult as a type of underground communication. Symbols which were agreed upon.''
The revelation of the subcultural lattice work vanishes as Kurt's girlfriend suddenly enters.
I got an electric shock,'' she announces, with a certainamount of wonderment in relating the incident. "And it made my finger go numb. I was plugging in my hair dryer to the socket,and my finger's numb. I don't know what to do! It hurts like hell. I mean, it doesn't hurt at all, but ... I got shocked and it affected me.''
Do you have any cigarettes, Kim?'' Kurt asks her in an eventone.
Yeah,'' she answers. "Do you want one? Want some pot?''
She goes out, still staring at her thumb, to search for tobacco and/or cannabis. Although these kids are far out on a technopagan limb, their familial interactions look as traditionally patriarchal as the Bunkers. In one sense they seem to have taken cyber paganism the farthest. Their model of the human being is really that of the computer with will. But in another way, they appear to have adopted a more sexist and radically traditional value system than their parents could have had. The Coyotes have all become pack animals, roaming thestreets for adventure, while the Kalis stay at home, shop for clothes, or mix potions.
When Kurt does get to the topic of socializing, he speaks about it in a language more suited to computer modem protocol than human interaction:
When computers talk, there's a basic hand shake that happens between two terminals. The computer is analogous to the human biosystem, or a neural linguistic coalitive technological system.'' Kim sits up on Kurt's knee as he continues. She lights Kurt's cigarette for him and puts it into his mouth.
Empathy is caused by frequencies being shared by people, and when they interlock their frequencies, they cause a certain level of syncopation. The closer that that level of syncopationis together, the closer that those frequencies are locked in the higher level of communication that you're experiencing. Interlocking can happen in what we now call protocol: the terms that are agreed by the two users.''
The highest level of protocol between two users is, of course, sexual intercourse, an act of creativity that TOPYmembers are trying to demystify. Since they see sex as the connective energy in all interactions, the word of has been replaced in TOPY-spell by the word ov, representative of ovum,''the sexual energy, which needs to be liberated from society's restrictions and reintegrated with the will. In a practical sense, this means using the sexual energy for the practice of majick.
Your dick is majick wand if you know how to use it,'' one roommate loves to say. As another of the many leaflets around the house insists in block type:
We are thee gardeners ov thee abyss. Working to reclaim a strangled paradise choked with unwilled weeds, subconscious manifestations ov fear and self-hate. We embrace this fear and our shadow to assimilate all that we think we are not. Realigning ourselves on thee lattice ov power. Change is our strength. We turn the soil to expose thee roots ov ourconditioned behavioral responses. Identifying and dissimilatingthe thought structures that blind us ov our beauty and imprison us from our power. We thrash these weeds beyond recognition, beyond meaning, beyond existence to the consistency of nothingness. Returning them to their origin,thee abyss. Thee fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration. in coum-union, we impregnate thee abyss; thee omninada; thee all nothingness, with thee seed ov creation.Cultivating, through will and self-love, thee infinite beauty and love that is Creation.
The creative energy in TOPY is always linked with the darkness. It is through recognition of the shadow (what Radzikconsiders the anima liberated by Ecstasy) that new life may see the light. The fertile void revealed is pure creative inspiration,'' because an acknowledgment of the unconscious programming and darkness within us opens the possibility fortheir obliteration. Leaving them in the unconscious or repressingthem turns them into monsters, which will sooner or later have to be dealt with in the form of Charlie Mansons, Chernobyl disasters, or worse. Still, to most of Cyberia, the TOPY view is unnecessarily dark and its treatment of the human organism too mechanistic.They have an almost puritanical obeisance to the forces they believe are controlling the universe. Ecstasy produces many experiences, but fear and paranoia are very rare.
Jody Radzik, for example, believes he once encountered the spirit of Kali directly. To him, there was nothing dark about it,he tells me as he makes a graffiti picture of the goddess onto a billboard at a construction site in downtown Oakland:
I can positively describe that experience as making love with God. I know that's what it was. Nobody can tell me different. I will argue until the day I die that that's what my experience was. It was a wonderful experience and it's led me to greater opening. Every now and then I do Ecstasy again because it brings me back to that incredible experience that I can't even begin to describe. It's there. It's there that I learned how to make love with God. It's how I offered myself as a sex slave to God, through MDMA, and it's brought me to really a wonderful experience of life.''
Several TOPYs who are walking by stop to watch Radzik paint. Whoah!'' exclaims one girl. They stare in astonishment.
Better be careful, man!'' warns the largest of the guys,whose nose has at least three rings in it. "Kali is dangerous.She'll get you really hard. She's the Destroyer.''
The TOPYs shake their heads and walk on in horror anddisdain. Radzik looks up from his work and shouts after them with a wide smile: Kali has her fist up my ass up to her elbow andshe loves every minute of it!''
As he puts the finishing touches on his masterpiece: Fucking art critics!''
SECTION OF CHAPTER 13
Coyote 1
The TOPYs, of course, took the idea of a collision-based nett-work even further. "Industrial'' pioneer and TOPY founderGenesis P. Orridge also bases his music on Muzak, attempting to create an even more violently anti brainwashing style of song writing than Eno's. His original group, Throbbing Gristle,was the first major industrial band, and even his current industrial/house band, Psychic TV, incorporates industrial sound sto deprogram what he sees as a Muzak-hypnotized youth culture. In his treatise on fighting Muzak, P. Orridge testified:
We openly declared we were inventing an anti-muzak that,instead of cushioning the sounds of a factory environment, made use of those very sounds to create rhythmic patterns andstructures that incorporated the liberating effects of music by unexpected means. This approach is diametrically opposed to the position of official muzak, as supplied by the Muzak Corporation of America. Their intention is to disguise stress, to control and direct human activity in order to generate maximum productivity and minimum discontent.''
Throbbing Gristle's mission was a social reengineering effort to decode brainwashing stimuli from the oppressive status quo. This motivated them to create what they called "metabolic'' music, for which cut-and-paste computer techniques werenecessary. They took irritating machine noises, factory sounds,and other annoying postmodern samples and overlaid them using thecomputer to create a new kind of acoustic assault. They knew the new sound was unpleasant--so much so that they considered it a"nonentertainment-motivated music.'' Orridge was more interested in affecting the body directly through the textures of his soundsthan he was in making any aesthetic statement throughentertaining songs or ear-pleasing harmonic structures.
The bare-bones quality of his music was thought to go right past the analytic mind, de-composing the listener's expectations about music. Making use of Muzak's painstaking research into theeffects of various frequencies and pulses on the physiology and psychology of listeners, Orridge picked his sounds on the basis of their ability to decondition social restraints on thought andthe body.'' Orridge claims certain passages of his songs can even induce orgasms. In industrial music, it was not important thatlisteners understood what was happening to them any more than it was in Muzak technology. The music needed only to deprogram theaudience in any way available.
For his current, more house-oriented Psychic TV project, Orridge has made a more self-conscious effort to expose Muzak andthe societal values it supports. The music still contains deconditioning elements, but is a more transparent parody of Muzak techniques. Listeners can feel the way the music works andenjoy it. It is less angry and abrasive because it no longer seeks to provoke fear and anxiety as its weapon against passivity-inducing Muzak. Instead, this lighter music invites thought and even humor by creating new and greater pleasures.Orridge is not merely fighting against Muzak; he is trying to do it better than they are. He not only deprograms his audience but reprograms as well, and makes listeners fully aware of the conditioning techniques of modern society in the process. This creates what Orridge calls a distorted mirror reflecting Muzak back on itself.'' He believes he can show his listeners and followers--through self-consciously cut-and-paste house music--that the technologies in place around them can be successfully analyzed and reversed. They contain, in code, "the seeds of their own destruction and hopefully the structure thatnurtures it.''
Cut and paste technology, applied to music, becomes a political statement. While beginning as a confrontational assaul ton programming, it developed into a race to beat Muzak at its own game. Muzak teaches that the world is smooth and safe. There is no such thing as a discontinuity. If a shopper in the grocery store experiences a discontinuity, he may take a moment to reevaluate his purchases: Did I buy that because I wanted it, or was I still influenced by the commercial I saw yesterday?'' If a voter experiences a discontinuity, the incumbency is challenged.Muzak's continuous soundtrack promotes the notion that we are in a world that behaves in an orderly, linear fashion. Cut-and-paste music like Psychic TV is an exercise in discontinuity. But rather than angrily shattering people's illusions about a continuous reality, it brings its listeners into a heightened state of pleasure. The teaching technique is bliss induction directly through the sound technology:
We've been saying that pleasure has become a weapon now.You know, confrontation just doesn't work. They know all about that game, the authorities, the conglomerates, and even the supermarkets, they know all those scams. So straight-on confrontation isn't necessarily the most effective tactic at the moment. Ironically, what used to be the most conservative thing,which was dance music, is now the most radical. And that's where the most radical ideas are being put across, and the most jarring combinations of sounds and sources as well.''
Friday, November 13, 2009
Douglas Rushkoff Blogs about his PTV3 experience as keyboardist....
The following blog posts re-posted from http://rushkoff.com/
Posted on November 23 2003
Me and Genesis
The next incarnation of PsychicTV – PTV3 – will debut at the Coral Room in NYC on December 5. According to the press release:
“The line-up ov PTV3 is Douglas Rushkoff, Lady Jaye, Electric Eddie, Isaiah Singer,Alice Genese, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. With video sculptures presented by HONEYGUN LABS, and live sound mixed by Scott Reiter. This event is cosponsored by BBgun Magazine whose new issue features Breyer P-Orridge and Psychic TV ideas. With host Lyle Derek,deejay sets by Nick from the YEAH YEAH YEAHS and more.”
More info at BBGun Magazine.
Posted on December 6 2003
Music as Medium
Well, we did it. Neither the blizzard nor the resultant gridlock were enough to keep us, our equipment, or 400+ people from showing up last night at the Coral Room for our first gig as PTV3 – and my first real gig as a keyboard player.
Predictably, a few of the people writing listings for the event assumed that I was on the roster as an author, and announced that I was doing a ‘reading’ on the same bill with a music performance by Psychic TV. Sorry to anyone who came expecting that! (And sorry to the guy who brought Media Virus for me to sign, that I didn’t have time to talk. Do send an email if you like.)
It was quite a profound event for me. On the one hand, PTV and its associated industrial scene is a little removed from my own aesthetic sensibility. When it comes to music listening, I’m more Neil Young and Boards of Canada than Throbbing Gristle. And some of my friends were a bit freaked out by seeing Genesis P-Orridge perform up close and personal – gold teeth, d-cups, and mania. He’s an acquired taste.
Luckily for me, though, the set list emphasized Psychic TV’s musicality more than its industrial roots. That’s partly because those of us in the current line-up are there as musicians first, and quite focused on songs and sounds. So it has more of the quality of Genesis singing with a rock band than a traditional PTV or Throbbing Gristle performance.
But to play in a band, and a tight band at that, for an hour or so, for several hundred enthusiastic PTV fans, was a peak life experience for me. Really. Giving a talk to a thousand college kids and answering questions is definitely a high – but it’s not the same. (If doing rock gigs was a regular thing for someone, and she had the chance to do one big lecture to a thousand college kids, would that feel as special to her as the rock show felt to me? Maybe.)
Chalk it up to early mid-life crisis if you like, but whenever I played piano as a kid I imagined myself actually *in* one of the bands I was pretending to play along with. Although playing alone gave me pleasure, it was at least in part the pleasure of anticipating the day when I’d do this for other people. Chalk it up to the principle of social currency, but it’s the connections that matter. Playing a particularly intense organ section last night, I felt the reality of what I’ve been talking about all these years: the music itself is just a medium for interaction. It’s an excuse for a kind of intimacy between the members of the band, and between the band and the audience.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter what the music sounds like or what the lyrics say. These are just the agreements we make in order to enter the state of consciousness and connection, together. (That’s why we want our rock or hiphop stars to have some sort of integrity or hipness – so we feel safe letting go. We don’t want to find out they’re sold out or molesting babies.) For some, I’m sure the music we were playing was, no doubt, too dark or loud or perhaps even too gentle for them to take the leap into sharing that space with us. Not every invitation is right for everyone. (Chances are they wouldn’t have braved the storm if they weren’t already committed to this scene in some way.)
But for pretty much everyone I could see from the stage last night – fans who had more of a history with this music than many of us in the band, even – it is Genesis’s very fierce, self-indulgent depravity that gives them permission to let go and join with us in the reverie. And that’s all that matters: access to one another, by any means necessary.
And now for something completely different…
Some of you might remember I served as the keyboard player for Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s recently (re)-formed band, PTV3. It was a terrific experience, though not one I could keep up given my other responsibilities as father, husband, writer, and teacher.
The band’s first album, Hell is Invisible…Heaven is Her/E just came out. Luckily for me, they kindly let me sit in and lay down a few tracks for a song on which I share a writing credit, as well (not for lyrics, but the music).
I don’t have a copy of the album yet, myself, but I ordered one from Amazon (actually, use the link and then click on ‘new and used’ for cheaper retailers) and invite you to support this band in the same way. They’re a dedicated bunch, and deserve to be out there doing this as long as they choose to. If you’re looking for some interesting music, also check out some bands I’ve been following lately: Block Party, The Freedom Haters, and a hiphop artist named Propaganda Anonymous.
Posted on November 23 2003
Me and Genesis
The next incarnation of PsychicTV – PTV3 – will debut at the Coral Room in NYC on December 5. According to the press release:
“The line-up ov PTV3 is Douglas Rushkoff, Lady Jaye, Electric Eddie, Isaiah Singer,Alice Genese, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. With video sculptures presented by HONEYGUN LABS, and live sound mixed by Scott Reiter. This event is cosponsored by BBgun Magazine whose new issue features Breyer P-Orridge and Psychic TV ideas. With host Lyle Derek,deejay sets by Nick from the YEAH YEAH YEAHS and more.”
More info at BBGun Magazine.
Posted on December 6 2003
Music as Medium
Well, we did it. Neither the blizzard nor the resultant gridlock were enough to keep us, our equipment, or 400+ people from showing up last night at the Coral Room for our first gig as PTV3 – and my first real gig as a keyboard player.
Predictably, a few of the people writing listings for the event assumed that I was on the roster as an author, and announced that I was doing a ‘reading’ on the same bill with a music performance by Psychic TV. Sorry to anyone who came expecting that! (And sorry to the guy who brought Media Virus for me to sign, that I didn’t have time to talk. Do send an email if you like.)
It was quite a profound event for me. On the one hand, PTV and its associated industrial scene is a little removed from my own aesthetic sensibility. When it comes to music listening, I’m more Neil Young and Boards of Canada than Throbbing Gristle. And some of my friends were a bit freaked out by seeing Genesis P-Orridge perform up close and personal – gold teeth, d-cups, and mania. He’s an acquired taste.
Luckily for me, though, the set list emphasized Psychic TV’s musicality more than its industrial roots. That’s partly because those of us in the current line-up are there as musicians first, and quite focused on songs and sounds. So it has more of the quality of Genesis singing with a rock band than a traditional PTV or Throbbing Gristle performance.
But to play in a band, and a tight band at that, for an hour or so, for several hundred enthusiastic PTV fans, was a peak life experience for me. Really. Giving a talk to a thousand college kids and answering questions is definitely a high – but it’s not the same. (If doing rock gigs was a regular thing for someone, and she had the chance to do one big lecture to a thousand college kids, would that feel as special to her as the rock show felt to me? Maybe.)
Chalk it up to early mid-life crisis if you like, but whenever I played piano as a kid I imagined myself actually *in* one of the bands I was pretending to play along with. Although playing alone gave me pleasure, it was at least in part the pleasure of anticipating the day when I’d do this for other people. Chalk it up to the principle of social currency, but it’s the connections that matter. Playing a particularly intense organ section last night, I felt the reality of what I’ve been talking about all these years: the music itself is just a medium for interaction. It’s an excuse for a kind of intimacy between the members of the band, and between the band and the audience.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter what the music sounds like or what the lyrics say. These are just the agreements we make in order to enter the state of consciousness and connection, together. (That’s why we want our rock or hiphop stars to have some sort of integrity or hipness – so we feel safe letting go. We don’t want to find out they’re sold out or molesting babies.) For some, I’m sure the music we were playing was, no doubt, too dark or loud or perhaps even too gentle for them to take the leap into sharing that space with us. Not every invitation is right for everyone. (Chances are they wouldn’t have braved the storm if they weren’t already committed to this scene in some way.)
But for pretty much everyone I could see from the stage last night – fans who had more of a history with this music than many of us in the band, even – it is Genesis’s very fierce, self-indulgent depravity that gives them permission to let go and join with us in the reverie. And that’s all that matters: access to one another, by any means necessary.
Posted on July 8 2007
And now for something completely different…
Some of you might remember I served as the keyboard player for Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s recently (re)-formed band, PTV3. It was a terrific experience, though not one I could keep up given my other responsibilities as father, husband, writer, and teacher.
The band’s first album, Hell is Invisible…Heaven is Her/E just came out. Luckily for me, they kindly let me sit in and lay down a few tracks for a song on which I share a writing credit, as well (not for lyrics, but the music).
I don’t have a copy of the album yet, myself, but I ordered one from Amazon (actually, use the link and then click on ‘new and used’ for cheaper retailers) and invite you to support this band in the same way. They’re a dedicated bunch, and deserve to be out there doing this as long as they choose to. If you’re looking for some interesting music, also check out some bands I’ve been following lately: Block Party, The Freedom Haters, and a hiphop artist named Propaganda Anonymous.
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