Well, it's game over. Our bubble of ignorance has been burst and we are now aware that Biden won and more importantly that the far alt right man lost. We were told the result during a low stakes exchange with a parent of my daughters gymnastics buddy as we waited to collect them up. The conversation as far as I understand it began with the pleasantries, on to the weather, then to an anecdote on her part until a comparison of ailments and a discussion of chiropractors eased us into the topic of the pandemic generally and the dark winter to come. We finished with the uplifting prospect of a vaccine and of the spring sunshine then, as we seemed to have wordlessly agreed to conclude she suddenly said, "och Biden vinner också."
My obviously strange and delayed reaction to this spoiler was reflected in her expression of confusion as I clasped my hands together, nodded and shook my head in combination. As she departed our feelings were first shock then disappointment that we couldn't keep it going any longer followed by huge relief at the news and this all unfolded just as my daughter stepped in for a happy hug after good session on the mats where she apparently was taught to back flip. It was all rather confusing and listening to my daughter and sensing her genuine, innocent unawareness of events suddenly made us feel the weight of our constructed ignorance; was it ever a wise move? What's done is done. As it happened we were sure to find out anyway owing to the number of grinning Bidens on display at Willy's where we made a brief appearance for mat.1
You know it appears we have a pressure valve hidden somewhere in our psyche and this we know only due to its activation by the news of the defeat of Trump. I imagine this is not too unusual and indeed, walking around Willy's we felt lighter than air, joyously plucking our products from the shelves, a couple of behind the back throws into the basket, a gesture of faux distress if we missed, a pirouette here and there, whistling a happy tune as we loaded the ljus öl.2 When we went home we had something of a party, which was not at all our expected reaction but the mood was high and look here, its not often that one can celebrate the defeat of an openly racist, white supremacist president, so on with the music and off with the cynical musing. I know not whether it was our choice or the Borgs that a Motown playlist was selected but with every öl dispatched the music and lyrics to these fine old tales seemed more and more apt; "I heard it through the grapevine, I was just about to lose my mind..." Quite so.
Eventually the great party in L'Estaque waned and we returned to our prescribed viewing to let the dust settle, our thoughts turning to our Doing and the season. Is it finished now? Is this it? We were in no state to plot a course last night or hold a pencil for that matter so we just watched the Whites3 and eventually, as Walter donutted his Dodge I seem to recall, we decided to venture out to the fields in the morning for a commemoratory soil, regardless of our fragile state. With that squared away we swallowed a codine and passed the night without another thought.
Next day now and here we are writing this having just returned from the back field with a new soil and one that I am pleased to say marks a nudge more progress. Perhaps not to the eye but certainly in the execution which was dither free and built of salvos; quite pure for us and it points the way. The picture now hangs above the ivories and we peer at it from the sofa, lid open and writing this very post. It is a close view of a patch of freshly ploughed soil which shows the tread mark from the tractor tyre. Look here, have we not all been run over by the Trump era. All of us. Even his supporters have had their world turned by the post truth plough and with the result in we look on to a new and changed context; another fresh start. All this is in the soil and today we were reminded of the pleasure of the close up subject, how it seems to suit us more and perhaps because in the abstract macro of it all one can play about more. In any case it was a wonderful trip out, our first in many weeks and we are left with yet more confirmation that this is our real work, or to use the Japanese, our 'ikigai'.4 In the midst of the Doing the world and its events are absent creating space for a super charging of the batteries, if all goes well that is. If not it feels like all is lost but the juice is certainly worth the squeeze.
As to whether this is it, well to tell the truth we have not made up our mind yet although we intend to have done so by the end of this post, at least that's the idea, but from yesterdays sofa the feeling was that we have reached the end but this so perhaps because our strength is failing and to be very honest we have begun to feel a little tremble in the reason.
Ducks, Newburyport arrived today but its too late, both for our sketches and the reading rotation, although we needn't stop that necessarily even if this is the seasons end. There is some catching up to do however; Don Quixote is currently in the lead followed by Infinite Jest with the Dickens in joint third with Pale Fire both at introduction stage. Incidentally we left Infinite Jest at a startling scene that made us think of you.5 Wallace is teasing out the plot bit by bit and one must be attentive to spot the clues, indeed a large chunk of information about the Infinite Jest is hidden in the footnotes which one might be tempted to dismiss somewhat as of secondary importance to the novel proper. Luckily for us we have our own interest in the game of footnotes, and reading carefully through the filmography of James O Incandenza,6 which runs for several pages of flippancy, we had the feeling we were being set up. And we were. Incandenzas final film is indeed called Infinite Jest and we are informed by way of archive note that Incandenza died in post production and the cartridge7 is unseen and lost. The plot thickens. Other sporadic clues have peppered us, most notably the fate of the medical attache to a Saudi prince who we see returning home where he is nursed by his wife into position, food pipe in gob, to watch entertainment 'cartridges'. A bit more about tennis and addiction and we are back with the attache who has arrived home once more to discover wife not there. He grumpily sets himself up for entertainment and searching through some old cartridges finds an unfamiliar one which he pops on and we leave him there. More of tennis and addiction and occasionally we are informed that the attache is still watching the mystery cartridge. This brings us to where we are, in the medical attache's room with the cartridge still playing on a loop. In the room also is the attaches wife, the Saudi prince's personal physician's personal assistant, the personal physician himself, two embassy security guards, two Seventh Day Adventists who had wandered in. Wallace describes them as "sitting and standing there very still and attentive, looking not one bit distressed or in any way displeased, even though the room smelled very bad indeed."
Now we are only at the beginning of the book but already the idea of an addictive spectacle which nobody can look away from seems a fitting analogy to the post truth era. We have attempted to look away in the last few weeks and to a certain extent in both our Dignity Scholarship seasons but we could never quite sever ourselves. An addictive spectacle is indeed an apt characterisation of our plight is it not, and this is certainly due to the technology as much as the overall political awakening which has undeniably taken place. What ever happened to apathy? Troy Deeney8 would tell us that apathy doesn't 'drive traffic', but look here, is it not the cartridge of social media which supplies our Infinite Jest, and this enabled by the smart phones (our little burnt spoons)? This shift and the far alt rise which has shaped and flourished within it has sent us round the bend, the process of which we call the post truth era but with the defeat of Trump I now feel that we can leave this term behind and begin to face whats next.
So what turn will the coming years take now that the flavour of events is different following the loss of the diabolical alt right pied piper?9 With this decapitation of the alt right imaginary will the attack on 'the cathedral'10 recede as a result and if so what new shape will radical left struggle take? There’s the anthropocene, the automation, the post capitalism, and the necropolitics for starters. All likely to be the topics of left struggle if the cathedral of snowflakes, dark matter activists and a raft of reinstated experts and public intellectuals are left to work away in peace without the inconvenience of being broadsided by the alt right. But what about incorporating something of the critique of the 'cathedral' into critical art going forward? Now this I say with a whisper because raising an idea like that in certain radical art groupings would get you turned out quicker than Brian Sewell from the Groucho club!11 Kill the gray zone is it?12 Still? Look here in the abstract one can do anything. To completely refuse any compromise with the ideas of the alt right and their popularity, and to militantly proceed onwards is one way but as we have said of our own mission, if you march far far down a difficult and defiant road it is just possible that when you turn back you find no one has followed. Well that is what happens with the 'general public' and the radical left and it is not enough to say that its about the overton window. So will there be bridges built to reach over the divide, branches offered, reconciliation, not with the bastards but with the 'people' specifically and in the imaginary as we struggle on. Why not accept the challenge presented by the post truth era to convince people once again of the fundamentals democratic society in terms of identity, race, economics and environment? Rearticultaing the whole shooting match for the times. Indeed in that sense there is the need to 'start again' but to do so differently somehow and so saying the question of critical pedagogy emerges from the fog.
But what of large scale social movements in the next phase, particularly in light of the pandemic mindset? Would it be a surprise if there was now a multiplicity of social issue movements and parties displaying something like a conspiratorial critique of reality? Remember Bez and his reality party?13 How prescient, (in both senses) and it does seem that it is very much 'a reality’ that is at stake somehow these days, rather than ’the world’. A subtle but crucial difference, in any case it starts to feel that we could see a situation where political masses of varying degrees of sanity, brew and coalesce online, sustained by unknown algorithmic architecture and meddling, before exploding into life like a return to the carnival protest of the anti globalisation times and possibly gunning for a slice of power to boot. Great, potentially, one might imagine, but a feeling we cannot shake is that all energies seem to be travelling from different directions to the same small space where hopes, dreams, perspectives (and conspiracies) come to an end with a crunch in a kind of psycho-social moshpit; our contemporary condition? Radical democracy? How much greater it feels to imagine instead all the differing movements pushing outwards in different directions, pushing back the walls, expanding our space and mind.
Look here we have all had our moments where we have fallen prey to the times. We have all been manipulated this way and that, all of us encouraged and funnelled into the big crunch of the post truth era but from that experience may come the future politics. Sanity politics? Conspiracy politics? Reality politics? Autonomous reality politics? We neglected to mention by the way that we managed to digest a factual work, relevant to these questions, by the name of ’5G Farlig eller Fantastic’. It focused on the anti 5G protests in Australia which have grown very large and has seem to have morphed into a social movement that has mainstream political ambition with the formation of the ’No5G’ party. This film largely involved experts batting away the concerns of the protesters which ranged from sensible but passionate to conspiratorial, but in all the talk of corona and radiation the more straight forward concern of surveillance was absent. Also in the festivity of the living protest there seemed to be something of the lifestyle choice to it somehow at least from the portrayal but perhaps that is perfectly natural in these Occupy derived tactics. Imagine with 5G internet there will surely be unthought-of ways for large scale conspiracy movements to build online before manifesting suddenly in the real world and perhaps into political parties. It may be that the future will gift us more not less insanity, perhaps not of the basic far right kind but of the tin foil hat kind and in this maybe one will need to consciously cultivate an autonomous relationship with reality in the post, post truth era? Maybe its more that one must mediate between realities and this may prove to be a feature of politics in the next phase of what promises to be a roller coaster of social movements which may dissolve somewhat the left/right divide and instead becoming more cult like.
It seems the pressure release has flicked on the doggerel switch. It is not healthy to go on like this, especially in the Swedish November. I've flipped a coin and I’m calling it off here and now, this is the last post.
You will say this is too sudden, too rash, think on it some more but no. This is it, for the moment at least, and while it is not our way I am quite sure, regardless of how tolerant you are with regards to process, that you might appreciate a conclusion. Well, if we draw any conclusion it is this; one must cultivate a little solid piece of psychological ground from which to act and to anchor to. We will all have a Pullman daemon14 but it will be ourselves! We must dangle the daemon us out into the realities like an astronaut from a space station, reeling ourselves back in to get orientated periodically. This is not so far from the artistic aim of constructing ones own institutional framing to work in due to the dissolving of the category that previously gave meaning: "contemporary art". This we have said all along in matters of creative work but now we say it might be just as essential to cope with everyday life.
So here we sit facing the soil, at the end and the beginning once more. The post truth era has established the rules, 5G now provides the smooth playing surface, and in 2021 the real 'game of realities' shall begin, but we are not at all sure if we will take to the board, certainly not in the way we have these past two seasons of coattail ranting. Our meagre, disparate and confused efforts may be the proper reflection of the era but let us say clearly that in the post truth era they should stay. If we come back from L'Estaque we will need a whole new bedroom set, a completely new relationship must be forged between our Doing and the times and at the present moment we have no idea what it needs to be or if our receding dutch ghost15 shall accompany us. So this is it. Thank you for two wonderful, if challenging seasons and please permit me this final verse:
To all the looking
To all the colour
To all the trying
To taking cover
To the seeds in the soil about to sprout
For the sake of ourselves its time to come out.
A handshake,
John
PS And as for your five themes, which I am well aware I have neglected these past weeks, to tell the truth, as my farther used to say, its all Chinese to me.
1 John has used the Swedish word for food.
2 Light ale.
3 Refers to television drama Breaking Bad.
4 Japanese concept meaning 'reason for being'.
5 To us presumably.
6 A character in Infinite Jest.
7 Cartridges refer to movies.
8 The captain of Watford football club, see Work 59.
9 German folktale.
10 In alt right political terms "the cathedral" refers to the set democratic and cultural institutions which make up society which must be destroyed. First concieved by Curtis Yarvin. See also Work 31.
11 Brian Sewell is a famously pompous and conservative art critic, the Groucho club was the fashionable social centre of the YBA artists in the 1990's
12 Anti fascist rallying cry meaning to eliminate compromise.
13 The Reality Party was founded in 2014 by Mark Berry who is better known as 'Bez' who performed with the Happy Mondays ensemble.
14 A Daemon is a type of fictional being in the Philip Pullman fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials.
15 Vincent Van Gogh