The cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realize its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them. The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things.
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What is to be seized has no physical dimensions nor relevant temporal color. It is not an arsenal, nor a capital city, nor an island, nor an isthmus visible from a peak in Darien. It is a state of mind, “monkey mind” if you will, the 100 million monkeys it takes to warm up the collective unconscious. We can write off existing universities. These lately illustrious institutions are almost hopelessly geared and sprocketted to the cultural-economic axles of the status quo; they have become a function of the context they came into being to inspire.
Of the American universities, Paul Goodman writes: "Therefore we see the paradox that, with so many centers of possible intellectual criticism and intellectual initiative, there is so much inane conformity, and the universities are little models of the Organized System itself." Secession, the forming of new models: this is the traditional answer, and in our view the only one. Bureaucracies of the universities mesh with the bureaucracy of the state, mirror it in little; and the specific disease of bureaucracy is that it tends to spawn more of itself and function as a parasitic organism, inventing "needs" to justify its existence, ultimately suffocating the host it was intended to nurture (cf. the satire of William Burroughs). The universities have become factories for the production of degreed technicians. |
Our "experimental laboratory" will locate itself, our community-as-education, and begin exploring the possible functions of a society in which art and life are no longer divided. The "university," which we suspect will have much in common with Joan Littlewood's "leisuredrome" (if she will forgive my coining a word), will be operated by a "college" of teacher-practioners with no separate administration.
The cultural atrophy endemic in conventional universities must be countered with an entirely new impulse. No pedagogical rearrangements, no further proliferation of staff or equipment or buildings, nor even the mere subtraction of administration of planning will help. What is essential is a continuous making, a creative process, a community enacting itself in its individual members. We must choose our original associates widely from amongst the most brilliant creative talents in the arts and sciences. They will be men and women who understand that one of the most important achievements of the twentieth century is the widespread recognition of the essentially relative nature of all languages, who realize that most of our basic educational techniques have been inherited from a past in which almost all men were ignorant of the limitations inherent in any language. They will be men and women who are alive to the fact that a child's first six years of schooling are still dedicated to providing them with the emotional furniture imposed on their father before him, and that from the beginning they are trained to respond in terms of a neuro-linguistic system utterly inadequate to the real problems with which they will have to contend in the modern world. |
Our university must become a community of mind whose vital function is to discover and articulate the functions of tomorrow, an association of free individuals creating a fertile ambiance for new knowledge and understanding, who will create an independent moral climate in which the best of what is thought and imagined can flourish. The community which is the university must become a living model for society at large.
We have already rejected any idea of a frontal attack. Mind cannot withstand matter (brute force) in open battle. It is rather a question of perceiving clearly and without prejudice what are the forces that are at work in the world and out of whose interaction tomorrow must come to be; and then, calmly, without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking . . . inspiring what we might call the invisible insurrection. It will come on us, if it comes at all, not as something we have voted for, fought for, but like the changing season; we will find ourselves in and stimulated by the situation consciously at last to recreate it within and without as our own. The threatened British labor general strike of 1919 could have brought down the government. The strike was responded to by the Prime Minister, Lloyd George. The Prime Minister said: "You will defeat us. But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state. Gentlemen -- have you considered, and if you have, are you ready? The strikers were not ready. -Alexander Trocchi, Selections from "Technique du coupe du monde," Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963) Are we? ~ThePeoplesWhistle |