Operation Garden Plot

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Manifesto of the Month

The United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2

The following information was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The original printing was of June 1, 1984. The information herein is UNCLASSIFIED and does not come within the scope of directions governing the protection of information affecting the national security.

In this document signed by the Secretary of the Army, is hereby assigned as DOD Executive Agent for civil disturbance control operations. Under Plan 55-2 he is to use airlift and logistical support, in assisting appropriate military commanders in the 50 states, District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and US possessions and territories, or any political subdivision thereof.

The official name of this project is called “Operation Garden Plot.”

*Still from the Turin Horse by Béla Tarr (2011)*

Remodernist Film Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Jesse Richards

1. Art manifestos, despite the good intentions of the writer should always “be taken with a grain of salt” as the cliché goes, because they are subject to the ego, pretensions, and plain old ignorance and stupidity of their authors. This goes all the way back to the Die Brücke manifesto of 1906, and continues through time to this one that you’re reading now. A healthy wariness of manifestos is understood and encouraged. However, the ideas put forth here are meant sincerely and with the hope of bringing inspiration and change to others, as well as to myself.

2. Remodernism seeks a new spirituality in art. Therefore, remodernist film seeks a new spirituality in cinema. Spiritual film does not mean films about Jesus or the Buddha. Spiritual film is not about religion. It is cinema concerned with humanity and an understanding of the simple truths and moments of humanity. Spiritual film is really ALL about these moments.

*We Live in Public (2009), a documentary by Ondi Timoner*

The Cluetrain Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Rick Levine

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

The Subgenius Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs

“Time Control? You’ve come to the right place…”

ARE YOU ABNORMAL?

Then you are probably BETTER than most people!
IF you suspect that things are much worse than you ever suspected—

IF the only thing you’ve been able to laugh at for the last 5 years is the fact that NOTHING is funny anymore—

IF you sometimes want to collar people on the street and scream that you’re more different than they could possible *imagine*—

IF you can possibly help us with a donation—

IF you see the whole universe as one vast morbid sense of sick humor—

IF the current “Age of Progress” seems more like the Dark Ages to you—

IF you are looking for an inherently contradictory religion that will condone megadegeneracy and yet tell you that you are “above” everyone else—

Then…
THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS

could *save your sanity!*

From the Language of Form and Color

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Wassily Kandinsky

To begin with, let us test the working on ourselves of individual colours, and so make a simple chart, which will facilitate the consideration of the whole question.

Two great divisions of colour occur to the mind at the outset: into warm and cold, and into light and dark. To each colour there are therefore four shades of appeal — warm and light or warm and dark, or cold and light or cold and dark.

Generally speaking, warmth or cold in a colour means an approach respectively to yellow or to blue. This distinction is, so to speak, on one basis, the colour having a constant fundamental appeal, but assuming either a more material or more non-material quality. The movement is an horizontal one, the warm colours approaching the spectator, the cold ones retreating from him.

A Statement of Principles

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Twelve Southerners

The authors contributing to this book are Southerners, well acquainted with one another and of similar tastes, though not necessarily living in the same physical community, and perhaps only at this moment aware of themselves as a single group of men. By conversation and exchange of letters over a number of years it had developed that they entertained many convictions in common, and it was decided to make a volume in which each one should furnish his views upon a chosen topic. This was the general background. But background and consultation as to the various topics were enough; there was to be no further collaboration. And so no single author is responsible for any view outside his own article. It was through the good fortune of some deeper agreement that the book was expected to achieve its unity. All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book’s title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.

Building Innovative Teams: A Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Kaylea Hascall

Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says “I need your group to be more innovative.” Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go “be innovative”? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?

Mina Loy's Aphorisms on Futurism

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Manifesto of the Month

On the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, various poets read from their favorite Futurist Manifestos. Charles Bernstein chose to read from Mina Loy’s Aphorisms on Futurism.

Before Valerie Solanas coined her S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Mina Loy was writing on the emancipation of women, specifically in her Feminist Manifesto, a call for social and economic reform in the lives of women. Lifelong friends with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein and one time lover of Futurist leader Filippo Marinetti, Loy is known primarily as a striking poet, artist, and thinker. The below reading was recorded on February 20, 2009 in the public space of MOMA’s Garden Lobby.

Download or listen below.

The manifesto as a literary art form is often forgotten, but we here at Mutable have had the audacious notion of collecting these remarkable objects for our Manifesto of the Month series.

Revolution of Everyday Life: The Decline and Fall of Work

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Raoul Vaneigem

The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.

Confessio Fraternitatis

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Manifesto of the Month

Chapter I.

Whatsoever you have heard, O mortals, concerning our Fraternity by the trumpet sound of the Fama R.C., do not either believe it hastily, or willfully suspect it. It is Jehovah who, seeing how the world is falling to decay, and near its end, doth hasten it again to its beginning, inverting the course of Nature, and so what heretofore hath been sought with great pains and dayly labour He doth lay open now to those thinking of no such thing, offering it to the willing and thrusting it upon the reluctant, that it may become to the good that which will smooth the troubles of human life and break the violence of unexpected blows of Fortune, but to the ungodly that which will augment their sins and their punishments.

LEAVING THE VIRTUAL GHETTO, OR THREAD BARING ITSELF IN NINE POSTS

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Mark Amerika

There have been tons of discussions over the last 25 years about The Future of The Book, The Death of The Novel, and the End of Writing As We Know It, but what really concerns me most is the freedom of speech in a multinational, corporate-driven world marketplace. Is our ability to freely express ourselves to the people out there who might want to read us always already predetermined by the economic cronyism of Big Money, Mass Media and Military Might? A reigning market terrorism and globally exclusive mass media culture have disembodied our voices to the point that we no longer find it necessary to communicate on an intelligent basis.

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The Performative Indoctrination Model (2 of 2)

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Ray Langenbach

As proclaimed by General Maxwell Taylor: „The lesson of Vietnam was that we were too late in recognizing the extent of the subversive threat. Every young, emerging country must be constantly on alert, watching for those symptoms which, if allowed to develop unrestrained, may grow into a disastrous situation.

„We have learned the need for a strong police force and a strong police intelligence organization to assist in identifying…the symptoms of an incipient subversive situation.“

Corporations and government joined to fund a flock of propaganda and surveillance agencies involved in trade and espionage. **A divided Berlin was the hot focus for these agencies.

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The Performative Indoctrination Model (1 of 2)

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Ray Langenbach

Two years ago a group of Asian non-government organizations held a conference in Malaysia concerning the right to self-determination in East Timor. The conference lasted for 10 minutes before it was broken up by a group closely associated with the Malaysian government, who had bowed to pressure from Suharto to not allow the conference.

The East Timorese have been fighting for their independence since they were invaded by Indonesia in 1975. An estimated 200,000 East Timor citizens have been killed or disappeared, roughly 1/3 of the population.

East Timor is one of the significant sites of 20th century genocide and Suharto has been a prime recipient of investment funds from the Deutche Bank.

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Cannibal Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Oswald de Andrade

(We here at Mutable originally found the below manifesto in the excellent online journal Exquisite Corpse, put out by Andrei Codrescu and translated from the portuguese by Mary Ann Caws and Claudia Caliman. However, it was first published as Manifesto Antropófago in 1928 and is considered the starting point for the Brazilian modernist movement. It is a cry for return to the soil and freedom from colonial control. To learn more about the contemporary state of Brazil, a good place to start would be the remarkable film, City of God, a crime drama based on real events in the slum of Rio De Janeiro by the same name.)

Only Cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.

The unique law of the world. The disguised expression of all individualisms, all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

Kibo's Happynet Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

James Parry

From: kibo@world.std.com (James “Kibo” Parry)
Subject: THE FUTURE OF THE NET IS AT HAND!
Distribution: world,alt,happynet,secretdistribution
Date: Sat, 2 Apr 1994 09:48:40 GMT
Approved: by all right-thinking persons everywhere!

P R O C L A M A T I O N & M A N I F E S T O
***********************************************

WHEREAS, the computer network named USENET has insurmountable flaws:

=> It is cluttered with thousands of disorganized groups.

=> It is difficult to use due to the various software interfaces.

=> It is infected with viruses, especially in the .signatures.

=> There is no formal rulebook and no official administration.

=> Bozos abound.

ZOCK: Outlaw Manifesto of the Age

January 12, 2021 in Austrians in April, Manifesto of the Month, Series

William Levy

My first contact with the Vienna Action Artists was through the DIAS, or Destruction In Art Symposium held in London during the autumn of 1966. Gunter Brus, Otto Muehl and Hermann Nitsch, and also Gustav Metzger, received a lot of publicity during this season. By art critics and underground newspapers, of course. Why not? Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York blew itself up at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, watched by a distinguished audience. Robert Rauschenberg had just spent a month slowly erasing a Willem de Kooning drawing. First there were Constructivists, then there were Destructionists. Yet even Time magazine was not outraged. In the article they wrote about these events, the Wiener Aktionismus, or Vienna Actionists, were grouped favorably within the in vogue international Happenings movement. And it became well known among certain circles that the then famous Pete Townsend, lead guitarist of the pop group The Who, had seen the DIAS actions. He adapted them to his guitar smashing performances that became a moving icon, the kinetic ideogram, of a widespread artistic ferment against the frame, the gallery, the museum, all received genres and the proscenium itself in its many manifestations. Transformed into a swank craze, indeed, the influence of the Vienna school became almost a leitmotiv of London’s Swinging sixties. Destructive art was featured again, and used as such, in the nightclub scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up. Jimi Hendrix showcased destruction art in his Monterey Festival performance.

The Art of Noises

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Luigi Russolo

Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,

In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming Futurist music, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.

Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.

Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites.

The Orgasm Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Harry Polkinhorn

1
America hates sex in general, but it especially hates orgasms, the pinnacle of the experience. It hates that which it doesn’t understand.

2
America if nothing else is an ideological construct. But so is sex, and so especially is orgasm.

3
The value is on change, and the rapidity of it. Burn your bridges. Don’t look back. This doesn’t change the way it worked for millennia but a kind of hyper-change, or high-speed motion that moves us out of a Newtonian sociality into chaos. Orgasm then becomes a strange attractor.

4
As such attractors, orgasms undo all this. They are a mode of resistance, if viewed in these admittedly fake political terms. This is the old boring tale of subversion of desire. Romanticism, really.

5
Orgasms happen in bed (usually) just as naming happens in print or through an electronic medium (usually). Or in the streets through spontaneous linguistic intervention. What I am calling naming as a language function always is embedded. We go to bed for very few purposes: to sleep, to dream, to make love, to give birth, to be ill, and to die.

The Manifesto of Negativity

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Harry Polkinhorn

1. Prescript: I have nothing to say.

2. Nothing counts any more; nothing ever did.

3. Culture is dead. It committed suicide because it had become successful.

4. The liberation of language, a poetics of freedom of the word, the Futurists’ parole in liberta, the jouissance of schizophrenic discourse, the transrational zaum of the Russians, all fit perfectly into their preordained boxes, gagging them forever.