Sharing some quotes from a book that I liked

(I cut out a photo of food from a restaurant ad, turned it sideways, and taped it over a photo of a hospital from the newspaper.)

Dear diary,

A thick book is lying on a table. Now a man approaches the table, picks up the book and presses it against his forehead. After a second, the man drops the book and announces, “There: I just now read this whole entire book.”

I’m not like the man above; I can’t comprehend texts very fast. In the olden days, I was embarrassed about the slowness of my reading, but then I heard that my favorite philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was also a slow reader, and this gave me confidence. I didn’t mark the passage, but I recall that he himself admits this fact somewhere in his own writings. (If my memory is wrong, don’t correct it.)

Yet, in the name of reason & justice, I should add that Wittgenstein probably read slow because he’s a careful thinker, whereas my own slowness is likely due to stupidity.

Anyway, this sets the stage: now you are prepared to feel shocked by the following statement. Yestereven, I began to read a book, and it interested me so deeply that I darn near finished the thing in one sitting. (On waking this morn, I completed what remained. It tasted good to my palate.) The book is by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, and it’s called Heroes: mass murder and suicide. But, before I give some quotes from this title, I want to tell you the dream that I had last night:

Last night’s dream

There is a long, straight, single-lane road. On either side of this road are vast plains: no houses in sight. I’m standing next to a huge traffic light, which is not lit: its frame is entirely black, and so are its bulbs. The fixture is emitting a constant, repetitive, high-pitched beeping noise. Now a guy comes coasting by on a skateboard and angrily murmurs while passing: “Why not hit the switch if you want to cross!?” So I look over at the base of the traffic light and notice that there’s a flat, oblong button, also pitch black, carved flush with the frame so that it’s very hard to see. I then cross without pressing it.

End of last night’s dream

Now here are some excerpts from the abovementioned textbook by Berardi:

I decided to write this book in July 2012, after reading about the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, that had taken place at a movie theatre screening the latest Batman film. A mixture of repulsion and perverse fascination has always lured me to read voraciously about the perpetrators of this kind of mass murder, a kind that seems to be proliferating at the moment – particularly in the United States of America.

There is no need for me to scream “SPOILER ALERT” just yet; for, aside from the fact that the book is a scholarly work that lacks any plot, all I copied above are the first two sentences from the very first part: “Four Notes in Guise of a Prologue”. I share them because they strike me as a good beginning; they give you a feeling for what the book is going to be about. And it’s important for you, the gentle reader of this here diary entry, to know what the book itself declares as its subject, because I fear that the passages I’ll excavate might deviate significantly (tho unintentionally) from Berardi’s main point.

As I’ve noted again and again, the artistic movements of Dada and Surrealism have been important and inspirational to me: they’ve done for me what church does for duller folks. (Pardon my bias.) So this next passage, occurring at it does on the very second page, won my care fair and square. (By the way, James Holmes is the name of the perpetrator of the aforesaid movie-theatre massacre.)

. . . Holmes’s gesture carried a tang of situationism. The whole history of the twentieth-century vanguard was reconvened there, and monstrously restaged. ‘Abolish art abolish daily life abolish the separation between art and daily life’, the Dadaists said. Holmes, it struck me, wanted to eliminate the separation between the spectator and the movie; he wanted to be in the movie.

Usually I am attracted by quixotic behavior, but Holmes strikes me as quixotic in an ugly way. And I’m eager to repeat yet again that I love certain individuals who hover about the movements of Dada and Surrealism, & not necessarily all of the “official” members of the “orthodox” factions; so, when it is written “the Dadaists said,” I instinctively want to cite my friend Tristan Tzara, who stipulates, in section VII of the “Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love”:

But the real dadas are against DADA.

& he also says, in the same place:

A priori, in other words with its eyes closed, Dada places before action and above all: Doubt. DADA doubts everything.

Now, for clarification, and because it’s pleasurable (I am suddenly more interested in quoting from Tzara than Berardi, tho I promise to return to Heroes in the end), I want to let Tzara further explain his own term in his own words (for Tzara is more important to me than Dada). First, here’s a fragment from “Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto” (Barbara Wright’s translation, here and throughout):

. . . art isn’t serious, I assure you, and if we reveal the crime so as to show that we are learned denunciators, it’s only to please you, dear audience . . .

Also the “Dada Manifesto 1918” begins with this epigraph:

The magic of a word—DADA—which for journalists has opened the door to an unforeseen world, has for us not the slightest importance.

Lastly, in the main text of the same work, we are confronted by a manicule and this all-caps declaration:

DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING

Now at this point in my writing, I decided (yes, so late) to see if I could find the original speaker of the quote that Berardi attributes simply to “the Dadaists” (‘Abolish art abolish daily life abolish the separation between art and daily life’), and in my quick-lazy research I stumbled upon an article that Berardi himself co-authored with Marco Magagnoli in the publication e-flux (Journal #73; May 2016), titled “Blu’s Iconoclasm and the End of the Dada Century”, wherein the same quote is credited to Tzara alone. So now I wonder how God will judge my soul for its use of time. Therefore, to needlessly lengthen this non-monetized diary entry, and for the pure joy of stealing, I’ll paste the two paragraphs that surround the line in question:

The separation of art and daily life was the enemy of the Mao-Dada rebels. We—for I was one—did not care much about politics, governments, and power. Our mission was to break the separation between art and daily life, in the spirit of Tristan Tzara, the Romanian-French poet who was later accused of being a purveyor of odalisques, narcotics, and scandalous literature. In the spring of 1916, while war raged all over Europe, Tzara launched the Dada project at the Cabaret Voltaire: “Abolish art, abolish daily life, abolish the separation between art and daily life.”

Lenin was sitting somewhere in the same cabaret, sipping tea or vodka; I don’t remember which. What would the history of the century have been if the poet and the communist became friends, and shared a common ironic style? Would the century have been lighter? Maybe. Dadaist irony might have been a useful antidote to Bolshevik severity.

I find that interesting. Now I want to return to Berardi’s book, but since his subtitle is “mass murder and suicide” and since we’ve been swimming in Dada, then, at least in my mind, Surrealism is just around the corner; so I’d feel negligent if I didn’t quote the famous lines of Breton’s “Second Manifesto”, from the part that declares “. . . it is worthwhile to know just what kind of moral virtues Surrealism lays claim to . . .” — tho I stress again that I’ve never been moved by the following moment or its rhetorical stance:

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who, at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel-level.*

& to be fair, I’d like to note the asterisk and copy a brief portion of the footnote that it refers to, because Breton explains himself in it volubly—here is its end:

* [ . . . ] As for that act that I term the simplest: it is clear that my intention is not to recommend it above every other because it is simple, and to try and pick a quarrel with me on this point is tantamount to asking, in bourgeois fashion, any nonconformist why he doesn’t commit suicide, or any revolutionary why he doesn’t pack up and go live in the U.S.S.R. Don’t come to me with such stories! The haste with which certain people would be only too happy to see me disappear, coupled with my own natural tendency to agitation, are in themselves sufficient reason for me not to clear out of here for no good reason.

Having deformed this entry with copious tangential quotations, I’d like now to return to the textbook Heroes. For the reader to perceive why these next couple paragraphs from Berardi’s opening notes struck me so severely, she must know that the year of my birth was 1977. I’ve always personally held this year to be a very bad year—the year when all the evils of life began—so, subjectively, I’ve long pitied my soul for suffering an unlucky entrance into our inferno; but it startles me to encounter such backup, such reinforcement, such corroboration from so objective a source; as it is written:

In the year 1977 human history came to a turning point. Heroes died, or, better said, they disappeared. They were not killed by the foes of heroism, rather they transferred to another dimension: they dissolved, they turned into ghosts.

Incidentally, this may be why the LORD moved me to conclude our masterpiece anti-novel La Man, which is the most personal and perhaps the most essential opus in our catalog, with the cry: “O aid, I am effervescing!”

Now, back to mass murder and suicide…

So the human race, misled by mock heroes made of deceptive electromagnetic substance, lost faith in the reality of life and its pleasures, and started believing only in the infinite proliferation of images. 1977 was the year when heroes faded and transmigrated from the world of physical life and historical passion to the world of visual simulation and nervous stimulation. That year was a watershed: from the age of human evolution the world shifted to the age of de-evolution, or de-civilization.

As you know, the dada-surreal art band Devo derived its code-name from this very concept of “de-evolution”—the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society. (I fished that last sentence straight from the encyclopedia, and also this next one.) Mark Mothersbaugh, a founding member of Devo, introduced the band to material like the pamphlet “Jocko Homo Heavenbound”, which includes an illustration of a winged devil labelled D-EVOLUTION.

Now, again, let’s return to mass murder and suicide…

What had been produced by labour and social solidarity in the centuries of modernity started to fall under finance’s predatory process of de-realization. The conflictive alliance between industrious bourgeois and industrial workers – which had left the public education system, heath care, transportation, and welfare as the material legacy of the modern age – was sacrificed to the religious dogma of the Market-God.

This paragraph is painful for me to read: its truth is too strong. My earthly father was a devout believer in this Market Religion, and it ruined our family. I don’t mean that my parents split up or that we lost our house—no, nothing so physical as that; but the faith-in-money that guided every decision in our shared existence induced the family’s spirit to putrefy secretly.

The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread,
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace . . .

as it is written in Milton’s “Lycidas”.

One of the aspects of our capitalistic system that my earthly father never stopped praising to the skies is competition. He would say that this is why the dreaded government, even if transparent and democratic, will always be inferior to the “private sector”: for (he reasoned) there’s no competition within the government, whereas private corporations must fight each other savagely to please the customer – and whoever pleases the customer best will therefore earn that customer’s business. Preferring social harmony, I myself have always recoiled from this type of competition, so I snorted when I read this upcoming passage in Berardi’s book (from page 77, as in the evil Year of Our Lord nineteen seventy-seven!!!) — and note that customers have, at this point, become victims:

Competition is all about subduing, cheating, predating. Blaming the victims is part of the game: you are guilty of your inability to subdue, to cheat and to plunder, therefore you will be submitted to the blackmail of debt and to the tyranny of austerity.

What does this have to do with the book’s theme of suicide and mass murder? I will tell you what this has to do with the book’s theme of suicide and mass murder. Many performers of those deeds are driven thither via those last-listed market-arms (debt and austerity).

Now I’m getting tired of scribbling, but I still want to preserve a few more excerpts, because I acquired the book via interlibrary loan, and it’s due back soon, and I’ll probably never see it again after I return it; so I ask the gentle reader to forgive me for concluding this entry by simply blasting out a rapid succession of quotes, with little ceremony, like bullets from an automatic weapon. — Here’s a part from page 140:

Financial capitalism is based on a process of unrelenting deterritorialization, and this is causing fear to spread among those who are unable to deal with the precariousness of daily life and the violence of the labour market. This fear in turn provokes a counter-effect of aggressive re-territorialization by those who try to grasp some form of identity, some sense of belonging, because only a feeling of belonging offers the semblance of shelter, a form of protection. But belonging is a delusive projection of the mind, a deceptive sensation, a trap. Since one’s belonging can only be conclusively proved by an act of aggression against the other, the combined effect of deterritorialization in the sphere of financial capitalism and of re-territorialization in the realm of identity is leading to a state of permanent war.

You might be able to see why I loved this book so much; it speaks of all this Excessive Violence as the offspring of Capitalism, like Sin is the offspring of Satan in Paradise Lost. As I said before, I never wanted to become one of those people who turn everything into an anti-capitalist rant; but I’m really sick of this system, and it’s refreshing to see the culprit identified so clearly. (Too often I hear the victim of this system engage in self-blaming; like my sister, who thinks it’s HER fault when her college debt precludes her ability to meet life’s needs.)

Now here, from page 145, is a nifty paragraph:

Suicide is clearly not a new phenomenon, but in the first two decades of the twenty-first century it has taken an exceptionally significant space in contemporary social behavior. Somehow, suicide has come to be perceived increasingly as the only effective action of the oppressed, the only action which can actually dispel anxiety, depression and impotence.

A lightbulb just ignited in my mind — I now recall a whim that I jotted down in this very journal, which touches on a few of the above-mentioned themes: it’s from my entry called “I fail not to preach and to rant”, but it’s buried within the body text, so I’ll copy it here for ease:

If you want to get educated, you must pay for your schooling: you take on debt; then your debt must be paid, so you are forced to take a job, and all jobs are horrendous corrupt crony affairs; therefore you’re all washed up: you’ve become one of them. Either that or you refuse to join the cult; thus you earn zero banknotes; thus you cannot pay your debt; thus you end up incarcerated. All Roman roads lead to jail.

How can the luckless masses make an effective change in this world without resorting to violence (this is crucial: non-violence is the only way), and without treating the affluent as unfairly as that coven treats the herd?

Mass suicide. I mention this only half-jokingly, but I like to consider it. What if all of us ninety-nine-percenters simply chose a moment to collectively give up the ghost? It wouldn’t work unless each and all participated. The one-percenters would not be too inconvenienced—there’s only a handful of them, remember—but whenever any of their clique members wish to travel, they’d have to wade through stinking corpses clogging the streets.

Look how I, even I, a true prophet of the LORD, have descended into this type of unrefined bitterness. Let’s move on. Let’s return to the book about Heroes. Let’s skip ahead ten pages from the last quotation, to the section titled “Japan 1977”, again that unlucky year of my physical birth. Yet, first, let me define “spiritual transmigration”: This is what happens when hundreds of people expire in tandem, and their souls rush to inhabit a single body who is being born at that very instant. As it is written in “Song of Myself”: I am large, I contain multitudes.

Nineteen seventy-seven is the year of mass youth suicide in Japan: the official figure is 784 young people.

Can you believe how many folks it took to make me? And just think: God isn’t even finished with me yet! Now, turning one single page ahead (to 156), we find yet more juicy scandals about my birth year:

For many reasons, 1977 can be seen as the year of passage beyond modernity. In Europe, this passage is signaled by . . . the political consciousness of mass movements such as the creative Italian autonomia or the punk movement in London; in North America it takes the form of a cultural explosion, of a movement of urban transformations which is expressed in the artistic and musical ‘no wave’ . . . [not to mention rap.]

And this, from the page opposite that:

Nineteen seventy-seven is a double-faced year. It is the year of the last communist proletarian revolts of the century against capitalist rule and against the bourgeois state, but it is also the year when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created the Apple trademark and the tools for spreading information technology. In 1977 Alain Minc and Simon Nora wrote L’informatisation de la société [Computerization of society], a text which theorizes the coming dissolution of nation states as a result of the political effects of emerging telematics. In the same year, Jean-François Lyotard wrote the book La Condition postmoderne and Charlie Chaplin died, and with him, the last traces of human kindness seemed to disappear too.

This is scientific proof of something that I’ve been calmly asserting for decades now: On the instant I was born, the last traces of human kindness abandoned the world.

(All this fuss over my birth, its date & effects – it’s very selfish, very narcissistic; I know. Do I think the whole universe revolves around me? Yes I do. But, isn’t it obvious? The real question is: Why can’t YOU grasp how fun it is to see things in this way?)

*

How appropriate. My mother just sent me a phone-text message: “Happy anniversary to you and your legal church-spouse.” – I swear, I didn’t even know that this was the day. I don’t believe in marriage.

*

OK now back again to suicide and mass murder… (page 163)

According to Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, the capitalist need for market growth inevitably leads to an attempt to expand periods of alertness, through a restless stimulation of social attention: ‘the relentless capture and control of time and experience are the form of contemporary progress’. . . . Sleep, in fact, can be considered an ‘uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism’. A society of insomniac people is not at all a comforting place, and the increase in productivity is paid for in terms of the loss of rationality and respect for life. . . . Crary goes on to argue that ‘sleep is the only remaining barrier, the only enduring natural condition that capitalism cannot eliminate’. Although in itself an accurate prognosis, this observation lacks a crucial element. The other enduring natural barrier to the financial intrusive hubris, is death.

That seems like a good way to end this.

P.S.

Here’s another rap track from my ancient demo album whose beats come from the sketchy unfinished patterns that I found stored on my brother’s drum machine.

https://bryanray444.tumblr.com/post/173125982481/a-rap-track-whose-beat-i-stole-from-my-brothers