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Sunday, September 13, 2009

FUTURIST AtTACK MANIFESTO 6

Fluctuating, vagabond lives are what we will create. If society makes us rigid, we will relax.... If society makes us armored, we will strip down to the berserker's bearskin shirt.... If we have become structured, we will make ruins of these structures and play among the ruins as a jungle growing through in lush beauty. There is much to be destroyed so that much can be created. There is much to be silent about so that much can be sung. For the range of colors that can paint the music of what our lives could be has not begun to be heard—or is heard only in the distance—a faint and beautiful cacophony that skims the edges of our present existence. Misheard by many as a call to other worlds, mis-seen as visions of heaven... The colonization of imagination that turns it into fantasy, destroying creative intelligence... But a few of us hear these colors more clearly...as part of ourselves—a part not yet existent (except in moments) because it is the selves we could create if freed from the constraints of the social context. Selves created consciously out of nothing, not constructed by social relationships in which our interactions are determined within limits that we could live far beyond. No language now exists to describe this way of being, this intensity and passion that is intentional and conscious, because such a language would have to be perpetually created and destroyed and re-created as each moment is created. All language as we know it is a social construction created to define the parameters of thought and perception—and so of creation—to limit possibilities to those that will reproduce society, extending the past forever.... Everywhere one sees this—in the papers, in pop songs, in books, on TV—language that manipulates our thoughts into a simplistic, limited range of choices. It is our strategy to use language against this, to subvert it, to undermine it. Always a difficult, uncertain, and experimental project, but also a game, a form of play in which mistakes are part of the adventure. To use language this way is to seek to make a ruin, a shamble, of language.

We are bound to be misunderstood, and we laugh at the idiots who misunderstand us! Kindly mockery toward the well-intentioned and unfettered cruelty toward all dogmatists and would-be prison guards of possibilities. In this way we learn to revel as much in misunderstanding as in understanding and take pleasure in worthy opponents. Making language fluid, flowing like a river, yet precise and pointed as a dirk, contradicts the social purpose of language and makes for a wonderful dance—a martial art with constant parries that hone the weapon of subversive language.... All of this said, we recognize that there is no radical language, only the intentional radical (ab)use of language aimed at undermining it and destroying it in order to create free and unconstrained expression. But unless one believes in the superstition of the apocalypse, in a sudden and miraculous transformation just around the corner, this process involves the dialectic use/abuse of language and other social modes of communication in antisocial ways. We are talking about the social modes of daily life interaction—the entire network of social codes and roles and relationships that have come to define daily life, everywhere, in societies—that are what compose a society. These are what Futurist AtTACK, as insurgent individuals, tries to subvert, to undermine, through intelligent, passionate play.

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