Feral Faun
Futurist AtTACK is an ironic yet sincere non-organization of the schiz-fluctuations of many me’s. Like the Futurists, we launch an attack on the past, but, recognizing the limits of their attack, we steal their name not to honor them–they too are dead weight from the past and always were–but in ironic mockery of their limited attack, and also to distinguish ourselves from the misty-eyed, nostalgic primitivist anti-tech, anti-civ kooks who long for a return to some imagined golden age of the past rather than striving to become creators of new and as yet unimagined galaxies of living….
The Futurists failed in their rejection of the past, because they embraced the present and the future. But the unauthentic present we experience is purely the pinnacle of the past–the sum of all has-beens. Technology too is just the past and its endeavors haunting and enslaving us. Civilization? Doddering senility, whose drooling, scabrous face disgusts us. The Futurist glorification of technology was a glorification of the reign of the past over all of life. And since the future only exists as an extension of the present and so of the past, it too must be destroyed. Futurist AtTACK attacks futurism in all its forms. We attack time and all its projects and products. We begin the creation of timelessness; of ruins that are not monuments, but toys to be played into dust, their origins happily forgotten; of a world in which all that’s left of the past/present/future is crumbling stone, rusting metal, broken useless debris in the midst of jungles lush with self-created living and each moment of each of our lives is consciously and passionately created with no thought of past present or future–and so truly authentic.
Futurist AtTACK has no interest whatsoever in preserving cultural heritages. Preserving heritages only serves the ruling powers since all heritages belong to them. A jungle, wild and unkempt, with the crumbling rot of a gladly forgotten monster–a dead civilization–makes a much grander playground than a neatly trimmed lawn with properly framed and reconstructed monuments to the enslavement and human sacrifice which are a civilization–any civilization… Away with all museums and the high blown rhetoric in praise of dead monstrosities–this superstitious veneration of the past! No more heritages! Destroy the past completely-including its abortive children: the unauthentic present and the rust-encrusted future that dominate our lives! We are too great for anything less than what we ourselves create…for ourselves…from nothing… Now, we will create ruins…. And after–something new and unimagined.
My place in this world is: Enemy, Outsider, Nomad… Even in the worlds of “alternative” culture, this is my place. To all of those who want a world–unified and coded–I am a destroyer, for I refuse all codes. With joy, I offend and attack, for attack I must! I expose delusions, mock mercilessly, and gladly make enemies of fools. If I am alone, it is because I am on a peak which others fear to climb, preferring the morass of superstitious worship of the past to the clear, fresh air of self-created living.
Ruins are the thing–intriguing and amazing playgrounds. Their beauty is not in what they were, but in what they are and could become. Too many ruins now are protected by the preservers of crystallized cultures. Free play is not permitted, because all are supposed to honor dead cultures–but why honor the dead? Everything dies eventually- there’s no honor in that. Before the ruins were ruins, they were monuments to oppression, obsession, superstition…to idiocy best forgotten… But as ruins, they are beautiful–for ruins are not symbols of past glories but signs of possibilities for life outside the morass of civilization. To play among the ruins-going wild in the midst of what once strove to suppress all wildness-a great thing indeed. But better yet-to create ruins! As long as civilization exists–as long as society creates the ways most people live–the most creative act is the creation of ruins. Crashes and explosions in the night – more beautiful than any symphony! Piles of crumbling stone and masonry–more pleasing to the eye than any sculpture, to those not blinded by the past! Ashes blowing in the winds – far more poetic than a million books of verse! Create amazing playgrounds, terrains for ruleless games and unchoreographed, crazed dances…Destroy!
Do I find the marketplace of culture around me very interesting? How could I, who hate all culture? Like a volcano, my mind is seething. I want to blow, to smash, to inundate this city with a burning flood, to create ruins that aren’t a sign of past glories, but are a finger pointing to the wondrous possibilities of a world in which culture has disappeared so that people can blossom as self-created individuals.
Fluctuating, schizoversive lives are what we will create. If society makes us rigid, we will relax…. If society makes us armored, we will strip down to the berserker’s bearskin shirt…. If we have become structured, we will make ruins of these structures and play among the ruins as a jungle growing through in lush beauty. There is much to be destroyed so that much can be created. There is much to be silent about so that much can be sung. For the range of colors that can paint the music of what our lives could be has not begun to be heard–or is heard only in the distance–a faint and beautiful cacophony that skims the edges of our present existence. Misheard by many as a call to other worlds, misseen as visions of heaven… The colonization of imagination that turns it into fantasy, destroying creative intelligence… But a few of us hear these colors more clearly…as part of ourselves – a part not yet existent (except in moments) because it is the selves we could create if freed from the constraints of the social context. Selves created consciously out of nothing, not constructed by social relationships in which our interactions are determined within limits that we could live far beyond. No language now exists to describe this way of being, this intensity and passion that is intentional and conscious, because such a language would have to be perpetually created and destroyed and re-created as each moment is created. All language as we know it is a social construction created to define the parameters of thought and perception – and so of creation – to limit possibilities to those that will reproduce society, extending the past forever…. Everywhere one sees this – in the papers, in pop songs, in books, on TV -language that manipulates our thoughts into a simplistic, limited range of choices. It is our strategy to use language against this, to subvert it, to undermine it. Always a difficult, uncertain, and experimental project, but also a game, a form of play in which mistakes are part of the adventure. To use language this way is to seek to make a ruin, a shamble, of language.
We are bound to be misunderstood, and we laugh at the idiots who misunderstand us! Kindly mockery toward the well-intentioned and unfettered cruelty toward all dogmatists and would-be prison guards of possibilities. In this way we learn to revel as much in misunderstanding as in understanding and take pleasure in worthy opponents. Making language fluid, flowing like a river, yet precise and pointed as a dirk, contradicts the social purpose of language and makes for a wonderful dance – a martial art with constant parries that hone the weapon of subversive language…. All of this said, we recognize that there is no radical language, only the intentional radical abuse of language aimed at undermining it and destroying it in order to create free and unconstrained expression. But unless one believes in the superstition of the apocalypse, in a sudden and miraculous transformation just around the corner, this process involves the dialectic use/abuse of language and other social modes of communication in antisocial ways. We are talking about the social modes of daily life interaction–the entire network of social codes and roles and relationships that have come to define daily life, everywhere, in societies-that are what compose a society. These are what Futurist AtTACK, as insurgent individuals, tries to subvert, to undermine, through intelligent, passionate play.
DEATH TO TECHNOLOGY!
DEATH TO CIVILIZATION!
DEATH TO AUTHORITY!
DEATH TO TIME AND ALL OF ITS ENSLAVING PROJECTS!
CREATE RUINS AND VERDANT JUNGLES OF LIFE WITHOUT CONSTRAINTS IN WHICH TO PLAY!
from the little “FUTURIST AtTACK…” pamphlet, Venomous Butterfly Publications…
also printed in “Anarchy: A Journal Of Desire Armed” #42, Fall 1995
http://www.anarchymag.org/
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http://www.anti-politics.net/feral-faun/futurist-attack.html