General Movement Teachings

*

»Did you expect this?« - graffiti, placed between the
Vondelstraat barricades, early March 1980. Time and again,
heretics have been surprised to discover that the march of
history can be brought to a standstill, releasing an intensity
which makes everything else just history, just movement(4 WDS
ITAL). More possibilities exist than can fit into our
expectations. They exceed our needs without meeting them. It is
these moments of metamorphosis which keep the engine of history
turning. Revolutions are moments for breathing new life into the
course of events. This is interesting to the heretics, but does
not impress them. Their fascination is valid at the moment of the
event itself, when an extrahistorical space opens and demands
exploration. Suddenly you're offered the chance to become
someone different from who you've always been. You don't have to
go against your mapped-out life path; another way of life turns
out to exist parallel to it. Consciousness-expanding substances
can serve as an introduction to this space experience, or be used
to enhance it. It's no accident that so much drinking, smoking,
snorting and gulping goes on in movement circles. But the subtle
difference between living parallel and dropping out is still
strictly attended to. During an event, you're moving in the
transit space of the emptiness. Turning back in time is
essential. Because only the blessed are able to hide forever
beyond the horizon of history. »Making history is not the
mystery.«



*

In the beginning was the event. Time was compressed, space
concentrated into one point - the metamorphosis took place. The
movement is born out of this first impulse. It seeks a way to
consolidate the last stage of transformation, to give it
substance. The movement knows no stopping now; it is past that
point. It expands in order to give the event maximum range and
place everything under a common denominator. But it can never
carry this totalitarian tendency through to the bitter end,
because the movement's internal dynamics inescapably lead to its
fragmentation. The original event had an overwhelming density,
which the movement later reinterprets in terms of a lost unity.
The movement attempts to retrieve this unity by subsuming what
energy it has left into a static establishment. Stuck in these
mighty ruins, the movement has a tendency to stall. The remains
stay populated as long as an internal dynamic between demolition
and construction is kept up. But the movement itself lacks the
mobility to become something else just like that. It will
endlessly branch off, get stuck, scheme internally, sprout over
again, be exploited, describe itself, see itself on film.
Metamorphosis, however, will remain a mystery, a game of
appearance and disappearance which does not let itself continue,
which followed a rule which is excluded by the movement's range
of standards. 


*

Why are events followed by a movement? Are they doomed to be
incorporated into a history which progresses from past to future?
Their abrupt appearances, which make fools out of the great
sense-makers of existence, were anxiously secreted away into one
continuing story for millenia. The astonishing detail of the
story, taken up into a larger context, was drowned out.
Currently, however, an opposite strategy for enfeebling the event
is being followed. The detail is blown up on the screen and the
continuing story is fragmented into items, whereby the mystery of
the sudden kindling of the event is made invisible. Neither the
media nor History are able to transform the dynamics of the
eruption into a story which stands on its own. While the movement
is inclined to »go on« in the absurd, the event is out to
recover itself. Its order is that of a cycle. It tries to repeat
the moment of its appearance, to rub itself out. The event does
not oppose growth or development, but breaks in on it. It follows
its own track. But it also invites us to step in; when it is
over, you step back outside. There's nothing more to it. It goes
without saying that endless enterprises will be started
afterward, in order to keep things moving at all costs, but this
does not interest the event. However the event is pulled and
tugged at, its brilliance remains unscathed.


*

Canetti writes somewhere of »the point in time when history
stopped being real. Without noticing, all humanity suddenly
departed reality; everything that has happened since then is
absolutely untrue, but we can't see it.«* This entrance into
post-history set in with the freezing of prewar movements by
means of the Cold War. The global conflicts which had kept
feelings running high for a half-century were made henceforth
impossible by the introduction of the Bomb and the deterrent
balance. Classical reality was thus left behind in an era to
which a return was impossible. This dismissal of previous reality
value was compensated for by the wholesale spread of auto and
television. The movement was picked off the street and
transferred onto the screen or the windshield. You could sit
back, relax and watch. Special movement study started here. 

History as a movement which propagated itself through causality
chains was replaced by a parallel circuit of easily digestible
news reports. The media in their constant omnipresence replaced
time and space. The media eye shines on everything. The remote
and the strange are continuously brought into the living room,
causing the place where you are to become suspended. A
topographical amnesia: one can be anywhere on earth, but where
one's really hanging out, no one remembers.

This permanent timeliness, however, can exist on its own strength
even less than can history. Like it, the media have an engine,
but no fuel. So the media suck everything and everyone into the
picture. They feed off every energy that is invested in their
reality. But nothing fits the scale of the media. Anything having
substance must be subjected to a revolutionary change. Every
object, every situation, every person must radiate significance,
which will then be used to report on something different. Where a
thing had been, there came information - the fuel which fires the
media. And here special movement study stops.



*

»Tear down a media.« History was cool, but now there are other
things on the agenda. Everything revolves around the media; the
extramedial is covered in even the most remote corners. But at
the same time, this totalitarian tendency evokes uneasiness in
the media. We want something new. So a retro-movement has
appeared which plays on our growing need to make history
ourselves, alongside work, in a hobbyistic or touristic
ambiance. It consciously pushes the media into the shadow of the
event, returns for an evening or a weekend to a place before
Canetti's point. We don't have time for the media just now. The
boundless, the unguarded, calls. Fortified with a helping of
media-free relaxation, we can stand it all again for a while
after. This healthful therapy aims to cure the medial fatigue in
the subject her/himself, but leaves the cause alone, since it has
its nice aspects as well.



*

Nevertheless, there are individuals who have undergone the
extramedial experience and upon return are left with an immense
rage. They experience their transformation into information as an
assault on their lives. They go on the offensive. The antimedial
movement which they unleash fights back hard, but wants nothing
to do with powers which oppose the freedom of the press: a hand
pushing the camera away, the last picture where the soldier fires
at the cameraman, a ban on pictures at the borders...Emotional
displays, all too gladly transmitted, because they prove that the
media still deserve the support of the democratic community. The
antimedials see the conspiracy lurking behind this league of
monsters. They demand that democracy's ties with the media be
broken. They do their part by literally cutting the connections.
No out of fear of contact, but in order to meet someone again. 

A 1987 »Theme Proposal« sees a lot of positive sides in the
attack on the media: »By isolating and attacking the media we
will reach more people.« Sick of the extreme negative portrayal
of its resistance, it goes in search of causes: »We are writing
this piece because there are still people inside the movement who
find it necessary to express their opinion to the press. The
time when we could achieve something through the press is long
gone.« The antimedial movement would rather have avoided the
media, but keeps running up against it and just can't get free of
it. Yet that's from a glowing perspective: »We were going to take
big steps and this is the biggest. No more press...To begin with,
it means a lot less work and ass-kissing. If they aren't up on
our activities any more, they can't write negative things about
us any more either. You do lose the chance to make your action
more important than it actually is, but there's more room to
create your own world.« 
The antimedials wrestle with the problem of how to meet others
without bringing the media into play. Because this has become
unimaginable, they seek other paths toward providing the media
with content: »Several computer experts are at work trying to
break into the Dutch Press Agency telex, the word processors and
typesetting computers of the newspapers and the central teletext
office.« This strategy aims to fight the enemy with its own
methods. But when you launch information, you become information
yourself. The theme proposal recognizes this hack-practice
dilemma. Therefore, it turns away from the electro-sphere and
resorts to bureaucratic jobs. Because the media don't want to
hear about their discontent, they are promoted to the status of
action object. The antimedial scenes' lightning strikes cause
puzzling breaks in the data circuits. They briefly create 
media-free zones, where meetings suddenly arise between people who
suddenly aren't getting a picture and come to ask what's going
on. The antimedial arsenal proves unlimited: short-circuiting
telephone exchanges, bringing satellites off course, burning down
cable boxes, sawing down electric pylons, not paying television
and radio fees, sending out fake press releases, getting cameras
to show up for nothing, pouring cement into dish antennas,
cutting assorted cables, cleaving TV screens in two, painting
over security cameras, altering data, installing magnetic fields,
implanting and spreading viruses and worms - communicating with
the hammer: »Talking back to the media.« 



*

Recognizing the omnipotence of the media and living with it does
not necessarily lead to happy destructivism. And the laborious
strategy of antipublicity can be avoided too. Instead of being
employed in an alternative way, the media can be taken to
ecstatic heights. This supreme self-experience of the media has
passed the stage of information absorption and transmission. The
point is to cause medial effects without references to an outside
world. This is achieved in the sovereign media. 

The sovereign media do not bid against reality, but endeavor to
make it the exceptional situation. It is not the media which are
conquered, but hybrid handiworks from age-old to hypermodern.
They irregularly appear in print, on the air, in data networks.
The program producers do not show themselves; they show only
their masks, in formats familiar to us. The sovereign media have
nothing to do with social developments. They do not emulate the
other media in their field. They make up no audiovisual 
avant-garde and are thus not of this age. They transmit nothing, 
but simply do their thing. The sovereign media have left the
dialectic of goal and method behind them. They do not approach
their public as a moldable market segment, but offer it the
»royal space« which the other deserves. They invite us to hop on
the media bus straight away. »Soon the boat will sail and take us
all away.«

The sovereign media dare reality to prove its existence by
denying it. They constitute a risky venture which plays with the
boundaries of the senses. Yet they are not concerned with heavy
themes like waste, excess or the game with death. They want to
travel, preferably as far as possible. While the media compress
the world and history to screen size, the sovereign media move in
the opposite direction. They suck us into a universe to sail the
sea of noise and to bring the oceanic feeling up to date. For a
moment, only media exist. In this transit space, too, the thing
is not to hang around too long so you don't end up in art or
politics, for the sovereign media's denial of reality borders on
that.



*

The extramedial figures regard this all a bit pityingly. When
they are asked to participate, they don't answer. They do not
wish to be spoken to. Without looking round they keep walking.
They appear to live in another universe. They're occupied with
all kinds of things, but their purpose remains invisible through
the medial lens. They seem never to know what they want. But this
dismissive attitude is not merely indifference. They are intently
concentrating on the right thing; their silence stems from this.
They only answer unasked questions. Their attention is focused on
the approach of an event. And when the time comes, they are the
ones who move into action without hesitation. When they have
accepted the invitation, the event starts to happen. Then they
are together in extramedial space. Metamorphosis takes place.
Then movement study steps back. On it rests the task of
chronicling the stories of those who return.