From: james morris <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] DIWO at The Dark Mountain only human
To: [email protected]
Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 2:41 PM
On 28/10/2009, "Michael Szpakowski" <[email protected]>
wrote:
<"Our civilisation is fucked! What are we gonna
do?" >
Well if it is reducible to that, why didn't they just
say that?
They're only human.
And if that is all they meant, why are we worrying
about *art* and not *doing* something?
We're only human.
I live for art but if I *am* in a boat going over a
cataract I don't paint a picture of it.
You're only human.
The prolix style & ridiculously self-regarding and
overheated tone came from the manifesto, not Edward's
clinical dissection of it.
He's only human.
I say clinical dissection, because although it's
undoubtedly true that Edward can *write* whereas these folk
can't, I agree what matters is the ideas and, far from a
Canute moment, Edward assists us greatly here too although
he admittedly draws back from the obvious conclusion, which
is that there is no separation to be made between the tone
of the manifesto & its content..
He's only human.
The truth is the bombast is not accidental, but
integral. It arises out of a fundamental poverty of thought.
The rotten style is a function of the intellectual void at
the heart of the whole enterprise.
It's only human.
Civilisation bad? OK. Let's see them give up the
internet, polio, smallpox and TB vaccines, printing, film,
anaesthetics, amplification, antibiotics, map making,
mathematics, musical instruments, a world governed by some
attempt at rationality and not ghosts, devils and malign
Gods.
They're only human.
Fuck it -let's give up the written word, which after
all is an attribute of civilisation. Let's return to a
lifespan of 25-35 for most people, carried for the most part
in a desperate attempt at subsistence...
They're only human.
Why not go even go further back in the search for a
chimerical purity, the one that relieves us of the
responsibility of actually *doing* anything that might
change anything, and give up cooking food.
It would be only human.
Artistically the, quite random, privileging of
"stories" could come straight out of one of those expensive
screenwriting courses which both contribute to and in turn
chart the market led corruption of the art of film...
It's only human.
Just to be slightly more polemical, too, on the
question of localism.
You're only human.
To spell it out - who are the current most high profile
proponents of the idea of artistic localism in this country?
- the bloody BNP, with their, in fairiness unrequited, love
affair with English folk music. Of course I'm not accusing
the manifesto authors of being soft on Nazism, just of a
failure to read history, to be even a tiny bit politically
literate, to look and to think.
They're only human.
I think you're right on your central point though, Bob
-the manifesto does essentially boil down to those two
phrases, which is why it's a recipe for utter political
passivity with a couple of quite randomly subjective and
unthought out artistic afterthoughts bolted on.
That would be only human.
Regards,
The One True Human.
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