dilbert1
Well-known member
... [cont'd]
But the raver is pursuing something different, and that is a certain tribal feeling of community, whether he's participating in organizing the rave or if he's just at the rave itself. Everything about his life shows his search for a perfect and immediate community where egos will have ceased to comprise obstacles between people. He seeks this so blindly that he's ended up confusing it with the hellish fanaticism of a collective quest for depersonalization, where the artificial and molecular explosion of individuality through chemicals has taken the place of inter-subjective development, and where an external negation of the self by the sadistic stomping of machinelike music takes place, and each person slowly erases the lines delimiting his or her singularity. From one confusion to the next, the raver, who intended to escape the false community of the commodity and the paranoiac separation of corporal and psychic egos, finds no other means of reducing his distance from the Other than reducing himself to nothingness. He thus certainly will have no Other left, but he won’t have any Self either. He'll just remain there at the center of himself, in the lunar landscape of his inner desert, which rushes him along, obsesses him, and stalks him. If he continues down the path of annihilation that people have deliberately directed him down, so as to turn him away from the revolutionary project of producing socially the conditions for a possible authentic community, he will only make his every moment of lucidity all the more painful. In the end he will have to choose to abrogate his suffering in one way or another - by regularly ingesting ketamine for example. For the raver, the cure has always been the same as the disease.
And that, at bottom, is the third object of his quest: a certain self-destructive pathos. But since what he's destroying has no value, that self-destruction itself is insignificant. As a kind of suicide, it's pathetic. That act, which once was the most dazzling affirmation of sovereignty, has now been stripped by this world of all its grandeur. People have now found a social function for suicide: it serves domination. This kind of leisure is exactly what the post-industrial society demands to bury any too-flagrant signs of its decomposition beneath striking colors, since it serially produces the kinds of brainless ectoplasms that productivity-hypnosis requires. One might even see a sort of overtime work in this kind of leisure where people submit voluntarily to traumas that only make them all the more resistant to the growing hardness of the world and of work. But to put it plainly, we don't believe in this desperate and premeditated pursuit of death at all. Everyone, at a rave, is quite simply behaving in the image of this society as a whole: it self-destructs in the most frenetic unconsciousness, entrusting the repair of the damage done to some hypothetical future technology, ignoring the fact that redemption does not count among technology's competencies. Because in the end, the raver is "the most contemptuous of people, who doesn't even know how to have any contempt for himself," the last man, who skips along on the now quite cramped surface of the earth, and shrinks everything down to size; he is of a species even more indestructible than the aphid. "We invented happiness," he says, and gives a sly wink. "A little bit if poison now, here and there, to get yourself some pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison in the end, to die pleasantly." Certainly, he goes on working, but his work most often is little more than a distraction. And he sees to it that that distraction will be maintained. "We don't get rich or poor anymore; too boring. Who still wants to govern? Who still wants to obey? Both of those are too boring. No shepherds at all, just one big flock! Everyone wants the same thing, they're all equal: whoever has other feelings can be put away; they'll fit in perfectly at the madhouse. 'In the old days, everyone was insane,' he says, and gives a sly wink." (Nietzsche). He's prudent, in fact; he doesn't want to spoil his appetite. But there's ice in his laughter.
Finally, what the raver seeks is Festival. He wants by all means to escape the hopeless mediocrity of alienated everyday life, as it is planned out for him by organized capitalism. In his own way, he is engaged, as were so many others, in the pursuit of truly lived time, and its agonizing intensity. But in all the apparent chaos of his dancing, we only see the imperious boredom of identical lives, identically uninhabited. The time when he's at raves is no less hollow and empty than the rest of his time is, and it fills his excited, consumer passivity only all too imperfectly. And when you watch him thrash about in it, what you're seeing is just absence gnawing away at him from the inside. But these aren't really parties: they're get-togethers. That is, they're additive multitudes of beings gathering in places where a few other people will have the decency to get them to SHUT UP. There, at the rave, there are but the shadows of men who have forgotten what they wanted to forget, runaways who think they're safe in the folds and recesses of their measly discourse-less sensations, the sterile rioters of a chemical happiness stupidly communing in a supermarket hedonism. Because the real Festival is none other than revolution, which contains within it the whole Tragedy, and the whole sovereign conscience, of an upside-down world. Whereas the revolution is the being at the highest summit of being, the rave is but the nothingness at the deepest depths of nothingness. This apparent negation of the rest of his existence is really nothing but the custom-built supplement that makes that existence tolerable to the raver: the chimerical abolition of time and consciousness, individuality and the world. All of this is little more than crystallized diarrhea for domesticated pigs.
We claim that the energy that's squandered to pure loss in raves should be spent otherwise, and that what we're dealing with here is the end of a world. We've just said a lot of things. It is urgent that they be discussed.
Signed,
The Parisian Fun Police, 1999
But the raver is pursuing something different, and that is a certain tribal feeling of community, whether he's participating in organizing the rave or if he's just at the rave itself. Everything about his life shows his search for a perfect and immediate community where egos will have ceased to comprise obstacles between people. He seeks this so blindly that he's ended up confusing it with the hellish fanaticism of a collective quest for depersonalization, where the artificial and molecular explosion of individuality through chemicals has taken the place of inter-subjective development, and where an external negation of the self by the sadistic stomping of machinelike music takes place, and each person slowly erases the lines delimiting his or her singularity. From one confusion to the next, the raver, who intended to escape the false community of the commodity and the paranoiac separation of corporal and psychic egos, finds no other means of reducing his distance from the Other than reducing himself to nothingness. He thus certainly will have no Other left, but he won’t have any Self either. He'll just remain there at the center of himself, in the lunar landscape of his inner desert, which rushes him along, obsesses him, and stalks him. If he continues down the path of annihilation that people have deliberately directed him down, so as to turn him away from the revolutionary project of producing socially the conditions for a possible authentic community, he will only make his every moment of lucidity all the more painful. In the end he will have to choose to abrogate his suffering in one way or another - by regularly ingesting ketamine for example. For the raver, the cure has always been the same as the disease.
And that, at bottom, is the third object of his quest: a certain self-destructive pathos. But since what he's destroying has no value, that self-destruction itself is insignificant. As a kind of suicide, it's pathetic. That act, which once was the most dazzling affirmation of sovereignty, has now been stripped by this world of all its grandeur. People have now found a social function for suicide: it serves domination. This kind of leisure is exactly what the post-industrial society demands to bury any too-flagrant signs of its decomposition beneath striking colors, since it serially produces the kinds of brainless ectoplasms that productivity-hypnosis requires. One might even see a sort of overtime work in this kind of leisure where people submit voluntarily to traumas that only make them all the more resistant to the growing hardness of the world and of work. But to put it plainly, we don't believe in this desperate and premeditated pursuit of death at all. Everyone, at a rave, is quite simply behaving in the image of this society as a whole: it self-destructs in the most frenetic unconsciousness, entrusting the repair of the damage done to some hypothetical future technology, ignoring the fact that redemption does not count among technology's competencies. Because in the end, the raver is "the most contemptuous of people, who doesn't even know how to have any contempt for himself," the last man, who skips along on the now quite cramped surface of the earth, and shrinks everything down to size; he is of a species even more indestructible than the aphid. "We invented happiness," he says, and gives a sly wink. "A little bit if poison now, here and there, to get yourself some pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison in the end, to die pleasantly." Certainly, he goes on working, but his work most often is little more than a distraction. And he sees to it that that distraction will be maintained. "We don't get rich or poor anymore; too boring. Who still wants to govern? Who still wants to obey? Both of those are too boring. No shepherds at all, just one big flock! Everyone wants the same thing, they're all equal: whoever has other feelings can be put away; they'll fit in perfectly at the madhouse. 'In the old days, everyone was insane,' he says, and gives a sly wink." (Nietzsche). He's prudent, in fact; he doesn't want to spoil his appetite. But there's ice in his laughter.
Finally, what the raver seeks is Festival. He wants by all means to escape the hopeless mediocrity of alienated everyday life, as it is planned out for him by organized capitalism. In his own way, he is engaged, as were so many others, in the pursuit of truly lived time, and its agonizing intensity. But in all the apparent chaos of his dancing, we only see the imperious boredom of identical lives, identically uninhabited. The time when he's at raves is no less hollow and empty than the rest of his time is, and it fills his excited, consumer passivity only all too imperfectly. And when you watch him thrash about in it, what you're seeing is just absence gnawing away at him from the inside. But these aren't really parties: they're get-togethers. That is, they're additive multitudes of beings gathering in places where a few other people will have the decency to get them to SHUT UP. There, at the rave, there are but the shadows of men who have forgotten what they wanted to forget, runaways who think they're safe in the folds and recesses of their measly discourse-less sensations, the sterile rioters of a chemical happiness stupidly communing in a supermarket hedonism. Because the real Festival is none other than revolution, which contains within it the whole Tragedy, and the whole sovereign conscience, of an upside-down world. Whereas the revolution is the being at the highest summit of being, the rave is but the nothingness at the deepest depths of nothingness. This apparent negation of the rest of his existence is really nothing but the custom-built supplement that makes that existence tolerable to the raver: the chimerical abolition of time and consciousness, individuality and the world. All of this is little more than crystallized diarrhea for domesticated pigs.
We claim that the energy that's squandered to pure loss in raves should be spent otherwise, and that what we're dealing with here is the end of a world. We've just said a lot of things. It is urgent that they be discussed.
Signed,
The Parisian Fun Police, 1999
