TACTFUL SILENCE
Deceptive Moves In The Digital Diaspora

‘One should cultivate an attitude of “indifference” towards life, avoiding judgements and opinions but keeping oneself in a state of alertness to each passing moment ... It was of more than passing importance to Duchamp, who began to make references in his notes to “the beauty of indifference”.
(Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp, 1997)

War photographer Dan Eldon met his death in Somalia in the summer of 1993. After UN troops had bombed the headquarters of general Mohammed Farah Aidid, a furious crowd vented their rage on a group of foreigners. Dan Eldon, a twenty-two year old photographer for Reuters, was stoned to death. Although Eldon made his name purely as a press photographer in his lifetime, we recognize him today as an engagé artist of the first water. Dan’s mother, Kathleen Eldon, published his ‘secret journals’ in 1997 under the title The Journey is the Destination. The Journals of Dan Eldon. It is one of the most poignant and fascinating picture books I have ever laid eyes on. On his death, Eldon left his journals to posterity: seventeen thick volumes, thousands of pages, recording his reflections on the world and his place in it, in both words and pictures. He was a true cosmopolitan, having lived in England, the United States and Kenia; he studied philosophy, Japanese and Spanish; and he registered and documented countless facets of his life.
The Journey is the Destination is a long, wild trip – a jam session in which autobiography, world history, drawings, philosophical cogitations, literary outpourings and naked observations slide kaleidoscopically into one another. All the boundaries between social commitment, humour, irony, sympathy and empathy are eradicated so that they merge seamlessly into a unique process of subjectivization. Trying to categorize Dan Eldon’s themes as art, philosophy, literature or journalism would be doing an injustice to his journals. Dan Eldon lived solely for his art – his journals – as his mother tells us in her preface. He saved his mixture of collage drawings, and writings for his closest friends and family, and refused to part with any of this material to galleries, magazines or art critics.
Dan Eldon was a secret artist - an immediatist, in the terms of post-underground philosopher and art saboteur Hakim Bey. ‘Fully realizing that any art “manifesto” written today can only stink of the same bitter irony it seeks to oppose,’ Bey wrote, ‘we nevertheless declare without hesitation (without too much thought) the founding of a “movement,” IMMEDIATISM. We feel free to do so because we intend to practice Immediatism in secret, in order to avoid any contamination of mediation. Publicly we’ll continue our work in publishing, radio, printing, music, etc., but privately we will create something else, something to be shared freely but never consumed passively, something which can be discussed openly but never understood by the agents of alienation, something with no commercial potential yet valuable beyond price, something occult yet woven completely into the fabric of our everyday lives.’
Art... er, what was that, again? In his lucid anthology The Adding Machine (1985), William Burroughs observed that we ought to banish terms that have lost their meaning from our vocabulary. He was referring primarily to labels like civilization, materialism, mysticism and fascism, but we could also add art to this list. No Art – No Politics is the name Jean Heriot has given to her engagé mail order business on the Internet. ‘Art is a five-letter word: BALLS’, wrote the Dutch (Utrecht) techno-activist Wilfried Hou Je Bek in his own periodical Kapot. Alles Moet. And the Amsterdam-based collective Adilkno (known locally as Bilwet) remarked in an interview, ‘We strive to propagate the abstention from commitment.’
Commitment and activism have become consumer goods. The cover of a CD by the rock group Rage Against the Machine, issued by Sony, shows the front page of that guide to bomb making, the Anarchist Cook Book. A sportswear firm called Nietzsche Gym, in the American town of Athens, a logo on its shirts, shorts and socks, consisting of a weightlifting Nietzsche above the aphorism ‘What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger’. According to Burroughs disciple Hakim Bey, every expression of grace and beauty – from Surrealism to Break-dance – is transformed within fifteen minutes into ‘fodder for McDeath’s ads’. Our totally transparent, media-manipulated society, Bey continues, is ‘more desperate for your “radical subjectivity” than any vampire or cop for your blood.’ Whoever seeks success must first be seen, and whoever is seen can count on a seven minute slot on a cultural chat show or a mention in the columns of this magazine. Ta-dam! ‘What the 20th century lacks most – and needs most,’ Bey concludes, ‘is tact.’ Or, to quote the motto of the Crooklyn Dub Consortium, Stay Low!
What is tact? I put my ear at the disposal of stand-up philosopher Wodan Windvaan, who recently gave a definition of ‘tact’ at the Dodorama music centre in Rotterdam: ‘It is the prospect of extinction, the awareness of a doomed universe, a subtle feeling for godforsaken data, for godforsaken events, for godforsaken locations, for godforsaken inspirations.’

The 1990s gave rise to a succession of initiatives that resolutely turn their back on transparency. Armed with the new tactic of tact, they lurk in the recesses of art, politics and philosophy. These minorities seldom if ever show themselves, but they hold themselves continuously ready and intervene tirelessly. In the shadow zones of the media, we stumble across such hazy alignments as the Critical Art Ensemble, Adilkno, Ma-ai, the Association of Autonomous Astronauts, Orphan Drift, Drunken Boat, Urban Guerilla Art, Atari Teenage Riot, Axiom, Surveillance Camera Players, !Po-Po!, the Neoist Alliance, Ne Pas Plier!, Auratheft Society, Zero UK, The Psychogeographical Association, Ninja Tunes, Hermetisch Genootschap Datapijn, Knust, Wordsound... All in all, it’s not so much activism as hacktivism – in the words of philosopher Sadie Plant, ‘the art of tapping into all possible communication systems.’ These are not minorities who seek full-fledged participation in art and politics, but who continually play around with their identity and image. One of their protagonists, the Belgian philosopher Wim Vandenbussche, characterized them in the post-underground magazine Mba Kajere as follows: ‘They are image hackers, radio jammers, video stormers, noise generators, meaning disrupters, surveillance theatre makers, psychogeographers, cryptographers, text mutilators and other consensus-saboteurs. Starting as helpless sponges able to do nothing but consume, they mutate into cultural viruses which stay patiently dormant until the immune system begins to show signs of weakness. They suck themselves onto the soft spots, infiltrate their barbs, bury themselves in the flesh and start emitting their cryptic messages. With their toxins, they produce their own meanings and create their own spaces – in those twilight zones, between the charred images and the imploded words, new crevices are forced open.’
The great exodus has started. Art has been scattered into the mediaspora. ‘Am I an artist, you ask? I am a flaneur electronique – how else could I define myself amid a profusion of media?’ the techno musician Scanner pondered. What the old avant garde were concerned about – the erasure of the boundary between art and life – has been replaced by a life in many arts. The Canadian artist Jubal Brown, writing in the editorial of his own periodical !Po-Po! It’s After The End of the World, expressed himself as follows. ‘We prefer to see ourselves primarily as living beings, rather than as artists.’ Not only do these meaning disrupters and consensus saboteurs operate in groups which are vaguely defined, but their individual identity is generally untraceable. The public identities of artists and activists such as Klaos Oldanburg, DJ Internep, Monty Cantsin, Bob Jones, Johan Sjerpstra, Wodan Windvaan, Karen Eliot and Luther Blisset, are really noms de ordinateurs for host of willingly anonymous artists, writers, musicians and other cultural terrorists. The ‘multiple name’, Luther Blissett wrote in the secretive periodical Datapanik, relates to an attempt to ‘investigate and disassemble Western philosophical and artistic notions about identity, individuality, beauty and truth’. The Belgian newspaper De Morgen reported last year that no less than five hundred different groupings and individuals world-wide sport the name Luther Blissett.
The pursuit of tact drives the mouthpieces of these groups into obscure but intimate media such as techno, mail art, zines, fanzines, e-zines, comics, free radio, video and websites, whose contents are often comprehensible only to an inner circle of initiates. ‘Either you’re on the bus or you're not on the bus’ (Hakim Bey). There is scarcely any explanation given, definitions are treated with disdain, and cryptical expressions generally make popularization (or ‘recuperation’) impossible. In their rap Discokraken, DJ Chet and MC Hou Je Bek proclaim, ‘A report, not a definition, of the things we do in the seas of time we have.’ Commitment, the Do-It-Yourself Culture teaches us, is a living practice, not a series of moralizations.
Although it might be tempting here to lift a corner of the veil, perhaps we should instead keep mum about this self-chosen clandestinity. As Hakim Bey says, ‘I know of several collectives organized along these lines already, but I am certainly not going to blow their secrecy by discussing them here.’ Blixa Bargeld, the spokesperson of the Berlin band Einstürzende Neubauten, uses the same tactic: ‘I know a huge number of interesting things going on in today’s Berlin. The city has a dynamic subculture from which new things are emerging all the time. But I am not going to tell you what they are, because it’s clear that the people who are doing all those things don’t want publicity. They have no wish to issue CDs or circulate cassettes – they don’t even want to be a band. So if we describe what is going on, we will ruin things for them. But there is a lot going on, believe me.’

I beg the reader for a little forgiveness for my evasive manoeuvres. It was William Burroughs who, in his war against the transparent society of control, took up cudgels on behalf of the passionately indifferent. In The Adding Machine, he states in no uncertain terms that most of the ‘shit’ on this globe is caused by people who meddle with other people’s business. He sums up his own philosophy in M.O.B.ism, or ‘mind your own businessism’. He regards M.O.B.ists as members of an artistic and political vanguard which he calls the Johnson Family, an appellation originating from the underworld slang of the twenties and thirties. A Johnson ‘wouldn’t rush to the law if he smelt hop in the hall, doesn’t care what the fags in the backroom are doing, stands by his word. Good man to do business with. They’re found in all walks of life.’ Burroughs’ M.O.B.ism recalls Duchamp’s love for the beauty of indifference – a notion which he in turn drew from the Greek philosopher Pyrrhon of Elis. Duchamp believed there were only two kinds of artist: the artist who involves himself with social processes, and the ‘freelance’ who does not form bonds with political or artistic movements but continually takes action.
Contemporary M.O.B.ists and ‘freelances’ are unattached to schools or movements, and shun artistic and political hairsplitting in their ‘total assault on culture’ (John Sinclair). ‘Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don’t stick around to argue, don’t be sentimental, be ruthless, take risks, dress up, leave a false name, be legendary’, Hakim Bey raps in Poetic Terrorism (1994) to the accompaniment of the spirited techno of Bill Laswell. In his journal A Pistol Pissed Under (1998), the Russian activist and performer Aleksandr Brener speaks of an International of Unguided Torpedos. The artistic discourse makes them reach for the stomach salts to suppress their rising bile. ‘To be honest’, Bey writes elsewhere, ‘the content of our art doesn’t matter a bit to us – it is a game that could lead to something, but it may just as well leave no trace.’
A topic on which there is some disagreement is that of tradition. The British ex-punk and neoist Stewart Home located today’s cultural terrorists in a long tradition of samizdat and the avant-garde. His (short) survey The Assault on Culture. Utopian Currents from Lettrism to Class War (1988) deals with Cobra, lettrism, situationism, Fluxus, auto-destructive art (Gustav Metzger), provo, mail art, punk and neoism as a single linear, chronological movement. The main opposition to his views has come from American authors such as the performer Bob Black, whose Beneath the Underground (1994) accuses Home of falsifying history and of Eurocentrism. The marginal milieus cannot, in Black’s view, be reduced to a linear tradition (that of the avant-garde). ‘The tradition is not a funnel’, he writes, ‘it is rhizomatic, it does not culminate in anything, it differentiates, insinuates, here and there is dissipates, elsewhere it permeates, and every so often it even pontificates. At its best it celebrates. And the beat goes on.’ Black accuses the Europeans of disregarding the experiences and developments of the American underground (non-linear, marginal scenes), a standpoint backed by Mike Kelley, an artist, musician and onetime sympathizer with the politically radical Weathermen.
During an interview I held with Kelley in 1998, he flew off the handle about the differences separating European from American artists. Both art history and the avant-garde are lies, he asserted, European exports that make all political commitment impossible. ‘Europeans completely misunderstand the relations between politics and culture in the United States,’ he fumed. ‘The written “history of culture” is a European product. The language of the avant-garde is a European language which has lost all touch with the class struggle and with social relationships. Practically all American artists since the turn of the century have been unequivocal proletarians who engage in political practices. Gertrude Stein, for example, did not write about cubism as an aesthetic movement but as a democratic manner of painting. But this isn’t what we are told at art college. Art is taught as an isolated segment that has no connection with politics. It pisses me off intensely. The history of the arts is one big lie. Why? Because all artists are social activists and present a threat to the status quo. Artists are garbage in the US, you’re part of the lumpenproletariat.’
Kelly has become a celebrated artist in the museums of Europe, but he has paid for this fame with the undermining of his political commitment. Art must of course always be nice. This is why the Amsterdam-based Adilkno aims its barbs at the terminally obese glutton we call culture. ‘Everything gets absorbed into culture nowadays - even commitment. We think commitment is often spurious. Committed writers and artists adopt a standpoint, but often they really stand for nothing - rather, they are just moralizers. And what does solidarity actually mean? You either do it or you don’t. It is a practice, and our practice simply limited. We take a restricted view in this sense of artists and writers. Our commitment is the “Do It Yourself” that binds us to a political movement like the squatters.’
The Scottish artist and author Alexander Trocchi argued for the abolition of art as long ago as 1963. His project sigma (1963-1966) aimed to replace art by a multitude of ‘cultural jam sessions’ which would bring about radical changes in social relations and ambiances. He therefore sought a fusion between the marginal milieus of the Beat Generation and of the European avant-garde. Under the slogan of ‘marginals of the world unite’, he established contacts with drug gurus like William Burroughs, poets like Alan Ginsberg, anti-psychiatrists like Ronnie Laing, occult figures like Colin Wilson and situationists like Guy Debord. Sigma was unsuccessful because the political dogmatism of the avant garde stood in the way of collaboration with ‘mystical monsters’ such as Ginsberg and Wilson.
In today’ digital diaspora – into which both the mainstream and the avant guard have dissolved and where the debate between modernism and postmodernism raises no more than a yawn – the jam sessions of sigma seem to be reaching full maturity, as techno musicians such as Scanner and DJ Spooky demonstrate. They would rather call themselves ‘cultural engineers’ than artists, and combine their indifference towards the established art discourse with direct intervention in social and cultural ambiances (this form of hacktivism is called ‘illbient’ by DJ Spooky; Scanner speaks of ‘mapping the city’).
The new tact admittedly wraps itself in a cloak of indifference, but at the same time it strives for a reassessment of commitment and activism. These artists and writers, commentator Jorinde Seydel concludes, ‘create their own context and try to keep mediation under their own control. They consequently take the risk of being misunderstood or wrongly categorized, but it is the here and now that counts for them, and nobody can take that away from them, because it is elusive. Their work sometimes deals out a unique experience, which takes on reality as a narrative in the life of those who have experienced it.’
And the beat goes on.