John Bentley Mays GENERAL IDEA Open Letter, Second Series #8, Summer, 1974. [ 9,338 words ]

dear frank davey,

enclosed: a scrapbook of journal entries,
meditations, excerpts from letters, quotations from
here & there, all about general idea, all written down
between april & december 1973. i hope you
will find it worth printing in open letter.


these fragments have come back on
the hooks I've thrown into the central
emptiness from which general idea draws
the forms of its vision. i have
not sought to comprehend that vision in a
complete architecture of prose, but
rather to record my mind's movement along
the surface, to note in passing; to
celebrate a certain kind of intellectual
experience.

there is no history here. readers who want it should look
at david zack's 'An Authentick and Historikal Discourse
on the Phenomenon of Mail Art', in art in america, jan-
feb 1973, or the newspapers.

somewhere, this should be put down, for the record:
general idea, at the end of 1973, embraced the lives
& projects of a.a. bronson, jorge saia, ron
gabe, granada gazelle, & could be found in a
studio at 241 yonge street in toronto.

general idea was connected by personal
engagement, the mails, & community of purpose to
artists & non-artists in toronto & in dozens of
places throughout north america, south america,
and europe. the social reality indicated by this
connection is known as 'the eternal network' & is
so-called throughout these texts.

unless otherwise noted, all quotations come from the first
5 issues of FILE Megazine, cult-journal & informa
tional surface of the eternal network, & central
project of general idea. quotes from 'robert venturi'
are from robert venturi, denise scott brown, &
steven izenour, learning from las vegas,
a book which has been my touchstone throughout this
writing.

frank, please send along
two messages if you print this
piece.

l. to general idea: 'the vacuum created
by your invisibility has got to be filled up
with words.'

2: to richard handler: these words are for you,
with love.

great Pan is dead


1

Getting the general idea. Getting the specific idea, the idea which generated the general idea 26 centuries after the specific idea came to present for us and all our history. Which was the moment on the mediterranean morning that Thales of Miletus got the bright idea that the architectonic principle of reality was water. * Miletus, centre of a vast force-field of trade. When Thales pronounced water the ultimate source of all structures and phenomena, he celebrated the historical basis of Miletus' wealth as a great port. When Thales posited water as the ur-material of reality, he posited as primary the time and space of commerce and of the city; the saeculum. The great act of Thales the Miletian was an extension of commercial time and space to perpetuity and infinity, a creation from the materials of urban experience a radically new image of reality which men would later call the universe. Ever behind this new monomorphic and commercial image was Thales' vision and celebration of Miletus: no longer merely a polis, but an ecumenopolis, one city become the world and the world become the city.

*

here it is, man, right here, where it all
starts, the whole push & drag of it: all our history,
the history of ecumenicity, performance & implementation
of the universe. (cf. universere 4 to turn into one.)

when i think of all they tried to do
to debbie with the electroshock & thorazine, it all
comes back: one empire, rome as the world, one
holy catholic church, the united nations, the
integrated personality, one universe in which
what you say is true in one spot is true in every
spot of time & space, that catholicity of
scientific fact, the constant hammering to get all
the wild threads to weave right in. i wonder if
they ever got debbie. haven't heard from her
in 2 years.

*

Coerce unruly reality, make it obey the natural laws. And don't stop at reducing it all back to the fluid origins, don't stop until everything looks like what Anaximander described as the ultimate: 'neither water nor any of the so-called elements, but a substance different from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them.' The city where everything looks like everything else, the getting back-to-basics that our West has been about.                                                            * Back in 1984, just before the general idea resurfaced from the subliminal after 26 centuries down there under water, resurfaced to celebrate again the neolithic revolution of mythic consciousness that had been all but snuffed-out by western, liberal science's long thermidor, empty men were caught in the seamless web of technological time and space, and faced everywhere Anaximander's infinite actualized in cement buildings, the monomorphous duration told in the dials of clocks. Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote in the fall of '84: 'The world around us turns back into a smooth surface, without signification, without soul, without values, on which we no longer have any purchase. Like a workman who has set down his tool he no longer needs, we find ourselves once again facing things.' But even then, there were those who lived a complex practice of myth in defiance of the secular philosophy, who lived-out the shapes within them, who decided to believe their ears and eyes instead of the lies propagated by Thales and his descendants, 600 BC-AD 1984: borderdwellers.                                                            * Borderline cases.                                                            2 In the first chapter of THE SAVAGE MIND, Levi-Strauss names 'two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific in-quiry,' viz.,' one adapted to perception and imagination,' and one at a farther remove. At a remove: the level at which science since Thales has operated its cultural machine for the production of ascending orders of abstraction and conceptualization. The first level, however, is discovered in poetry, rituals, myths, obsessions, visions, 'which preserve until the present time the remains of methods of observation and reflection that were (and no doubt still are) precisely adapted to discoveries of a certain type: those which nature authorized for the starting point of a speculative organization and exploitation of the 'sensible world in sensible terms'.

*


dear rob,

have just finished re-reading Levi-strauss on the
savage mind, per your suggestion, and am especially
flashing on that 1st chapter on the science of the
concrete, which seems to me to be just that sensual
good-sense science which (e.g.) the zuni ceremonials
i've been working on are all about. also, cf.
susan sontag's distinction between hermeneutics & erotics,
as the two accessible ways of getting-along & into
the structures of things, a distinction i like, as
you know, so will now hold forth on that.

HERMENEUTIC APPROACH, sanctioned by liberal science, a
getting into the meaning of the thing.
EROTIC APPROACH, sensually organized information-gathering
& storing, stopping at the surfaces, letting
the things be.

which brings me back to general idea, image
bank, the eternal networkery i've been thinking about
since last april. it seems to me that g.i. goes
right along the chromatic surfaces of the objects &
artifacts, calls it all back again & again as a
ritual investigation--as sensuous memory, like
remembrance of a dance or embrace--making love to
things.

i don't call this research a parody of bourgeois
science, but its opposite & predecessor &, i think,
its successor. it's a part of g.i.'s rejection of
the history that has rejected them that they move
right out of the informational organization of that
history (particularly the libraries, as facts &
as metaphors), & replace the libraries with a complex
of relationships, dreams, sensuous episodes, myths,
gossip, etc., all held in the collective mind of the
eternal network by means of the rituals Levi-strauss
calls 'the memory bank' & general idea calls
'the image bank'. which is the sensory resumé of their lives
together, & which turns out to be their
eschatology; a vision of the world to come.

which makes me wonder again where
all the hermeneutics got us? down to, back to what?
'against interpretation', the erotic epistemology
gives us the surfaces, the total tracery & display
of it. general idea is producing a choreography
of the erogenous zone, which is the world we've got
properly beheld & loved.

*

On the borderline: here we find the rebirth of the general idea, which is the way of seeing, beholding exorcised by Thales. The borderline is where the mythic consciousness is born again.                                                            * Here in the detritus of the vanquished sectors of reality, we find a new dance of the edges (after so long a silence) which is dancing everything back together (after so much will to exclusion); a new mythology of the things that are; a new resting within the giveness of things. The workman leaves aside his tools here on the borderline, faces things, gives up all hope of returning from this exile, discovers in the historical junkyard the food of vision, the lumber of dwelling. The workman leaves off the project of will and initiates what Heidegger calls poesis, poise with and among the objects of the place he's found himself.                                                            * General Idea, exemplary witness and embodiment of the culture of the borderline, carries from 1984 into the future the strategies of inclusion authorized by nature 'for the starting point of a speculative organization and exploitation of the sensible world in sensible terms.' It starts, as Paris Dada started, as imagination must always start, with an embrace of the repressed and excluded, in this case: children, madmen, cranks, disintegrating tribes, the perverse, lost and marginal; and carries on its work (to use Geza Roheim's distinction) in the creation of new myths of paternity and new folktales of fraternity; rumour and gossip. 'One must step into something. If one looks, there are two things, there is history for the great and myths for the rabble and subliminal.'                                                            * General Idea takes its stand on the edge, 'one step ahead of reduction ad absurdum and one step behind reduction ad logicum', within the radically new situation created by the extension of urban space to the margins of reality. They take a stand on the fringe, as 'renegades of the old order updated, culture criminals'; as primitives in the modern age, in the sense that they image the problem of their existence as primitives do: as a symptom of the unending war between nature and culture; as documenters of the war-zone, which is illuminated, not with the brilliant sunlight so dear to this century's older primitivists, but with the new, neon lux barbare. The characteristic subject of the older primitivists was the beach. General Idea turns to the streets of night to find the modern savages being extinguished by the daylight of rationality: Alex the Holy, Clara the Bag Lady, the Queen of Sweden, Moondog, the man who kisses fire-hydrants, Pascal. General Idea's work is an unending martyrology of all those who have refused to worship the god of unification, who perversely maintain their continuity with the polymorphous theatre of the pre-Thalesian past of humanity and the polymorphous theatre of its future.                                                            3 Beyond the narrow ethical concerns and tacit religiosity of traditional avant-gardism, General Idea moves along the borderline. Like Isis, General Idea moves along the world's beach, gathering the fragments of love's body, life's body, harvesting despite the horror, compelled by compassion for the things that are. The gangsters whose name is SET rule the world. They are determined to integrate everything into one thing. General Idea knows this, renounces all the doomed and endlessly repeated attempts to change the situation, embraces instead the new and compassionate practice of reality that names the world anew: documentation. Gathering the rent body of Osiris back into a coherence of poetry: the image bank.

*

(dear doug, i'm sending you these words which i set
down last week in about a minute, automatic/associational
tatters of idea: about mail-art flowing along the
eternal network, documentation, the things general
idea does. you don't have to take them seriously. just
take them, for all the old reasons.)

'without containers and stripped of our powers we lay off our limits by unfocusing the discriminating eye'

unfocusing   unintegrating nbsp; uncriticizing seeing everything at once (the collective eye of the eternal network) or seeing everything in one thing (holistically) looking at postcards holistically, or as synecdoche

we can see everything through the window of a card, it's all clear we go falling into the image, and thence out of fixed-time and into the interzone-non/time of the borderline all the while unfocusing unintegrating uncriticizing unzipping (there are no private parts on the border line) lights on lights on, everybody lights on every body and everything it's all clear now here in the apocalypse junkyard the clear light of the bardo thodol, or light-on the light is on: general idea's documentation documents the light on things

aristotle said that even ugly things are beautiful under a strong light

the light is on there aren't any ugly things here in the apocalypse playground and workroom

beyond the lie of the snapshot (henri bergson) beyond the fallacy of simple location (a.n. whitehead)         it's time to tell the truth beyond the reality principle (it's time to do the truth, which is not as it seems)         there are a lot of liars here in the apocalypse studio:         photographs, clocks, maps, newspapers, calendars,         tv sets, tour guides

beyond the lie of the snapshot, the sensory lie of stops and units and freezes in the total flow         mel bochner, in his 1967-1970 speculations: 'percep-         tion of an object is generally preconceived as taking         place within a point-by-point time. this discon-         nected time, a lingering bias of tense in language,         restricts our experiencing the conjunction between         object and observation. when this conjunction is         acknowledged, 'things' become indistinguishable         from events. carried to its conclusion, physicality,         or what separates the material from the nonmaterial         (the object of our observation), is merely a contex-         tual detail.'

beyond the fallacy of simple location         bochner says that 'suppression of internal relational         concerns opened the way for the involvement with         ideas beyond the concentricity of objects. it became         apparent that the entire foundation of art experienced         from a 'point of view' was irrelevant to art of attenuated         size or total surround, i.e., works without experienced         centers.' the eternal network, the mails: the total surround         of information, kinetic ideas or images of acts: the postcard         basis of reality beyond the fallacy of simple location the postcards say everything is happening

everywhere and nothing is happening everywhere and it makes no difference where you are happening in the holistic theatre if you are happening anywhere you are happening everywhere

beyond the reality principle

bochner wants to know what would happen if we started viewing things across space instead of in space, and he speculates that it would lead to a 'sense of trajectory rather than identity'

beyond the reality principle

the undifferentiated consciousness of infantile sexuality, or of the old american Indian coyote/trickster (cf. Jung's essay on the trickster) who goes around disrupting the static identities of persons and things, or of the postcard system with no experienced centre, no unifying principle

beyond the reality principle

uncensoring desublimating uncontaining unfocusing taking it all in through every orifice and pore and cranny of our bodies which are the walls of the apocalypse drive-in image bank

(love, john)

*

Trotsky believed that, with the advent of communism, the energies which had to that moment been directed into the production of art-objects would be released for the creation of society as a total work of art. No more play, because no more work. When work becomes play, the distinction becomes obsolete. Existence becomes endless act, or theatre. But Trotsky's view is merely a late, secularized version of the eschatology of the great mystical thinkers of all times — though I am thinking here specifically of Meister Eckhart — which comprehends history as the materialization of the pre-existent forms stored in the image bank of God's imagination: forms which are not (as in Plato) eternally existent ideas, but (as in Eckhart) perpetually-incarnating images of acts. The end is pure act. Reality as simultaneity. Consciousness is no longer bound to the lies of snapshots and the fable of the discrete object, but now liberated into an all-kosmic, simultaneous apperception. An image of this end is the image bank, the eternal network's collection of the images of acts (or rituals or ritual acts); the postcards, and documentations, and souvenirs that together are the total statement of where the network stands, which is on the side of the act and rite. So, too, the eternal network itself, whose unfocused eye knows no hierarchy of judgment, nor temporal lapse between cause and effect, nor spatial contingency — all these secular elements are abolished in the ritual of mailings--is an image of that future glimpsed also by Eckhart and Trotsky.                                                            * Like Blaise Pascal's God, the eternal network is a sphere whose centre is everywhere (Toronto; New York; Saskatoon; London; Vancouver; Abilene, Texas; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Newmarket, Ontario; etc.) and whose circumference is nowhere.

4

dear a.a. bronson, i've decided never to try to interview anybody from general idea again as long as i live. you win. 'let's keep this on the surface.'

john mays

*

Neither this nor that, neither one nor the other, belonging neither to the realm of culture or that of nature, the sphinx of image goes along the borderline, riddling. No right answers, no wrong answers. What's the question, anyhow? I've tried moving along the borderline with General Idea. I've heard the riddles of their lives and acts. Their enigmas undo me, unfocus me, reduce me to an erratic note-taker in the informational wilderness they move through with such assurance. I don't know what's going on. I wasn't like this when I was doing 'Phyllis Webb'. Her poems held out their cold, little questions to me, gave me something to do in that desolate summer when the lights went out. Poetry is like that, it all seems written to be criticized, used as a pretext for the intellectual game. Maybe General Idea isn't asking anything. Maybe I'm being left alone at the door of my warehouse of answers, which rot now like grain under the blank sky of all this unasking.

*

dear freekie, i don't see any point in talking with the general ideas any more, except that i like a couple of them. i don't think they want this article i've projected, or, in any case it doesn't seem to make any difference to them, not enough to feed in anything that i would like to know. e.g. i asked a.a. bronson what he was doing in 1967, hoping to get an idea of what the psychic time / space factors were back there in that annus mirabilis of the counter-cultural shift downstream, etc. he told me he was at expo. i'm dealing with those guys at the strictly artifactual level from now on.

love,
PEARL

5

FILE as the surface of the eternal network, registering effects. Absent is the avant-gardeist concern with causes, with apocalyptic stripping, with getting to the heart of the matter. FILE, like every other object of kitsch taste (e.g. pornography, THE NATIONAL INQUIRER, souvenirs) documents emotional affect, calls to mind the moment when stimulus explodes into feeling. Anecdotes, gossip, racy stories, rumours from here and there, verbal extravaganzas: there's never a dull moment with FILE. (There's never a dull moment in any eschatology.) FILE documents the emotional surge across the skin of the eternal network: who's doing what, with whom, where. 'FILE is precisely this: the extension and documentation of available space, the authentication and reinforcement of available myths lying within the context of Canadian art today.' Its power — which it shares with pornography — lies in its ability to tear the reader out of his comfortable contexts for a moment and draw him into that fantastic commonality of which desire is the only common denominator.                                                            * FILE as a sacrament of the new order of things. A ritual-arena for the loss of self, and subsequent merging into a new collective self. A regression back to beginnings, to the primary complexes and obsessions; to the primary ambiguities: 'Ambiguity is not the symptom of a schizophrenic who travels back and forth across the line but a quality of the border dweller who performs in stolen moments.' Off with the new (our individuality; our static, acquired, adult identities), and on with the old: nonsense, insanity, neither this nor that, playing doctor in the basement. Polymorphous perversity. Kid's stuff. Myth.                                                            * Like children under the sun (or under the gun), the editors of FILE play around with whatever's at hand. ' . . . FILE, no longer mirroring a scene, mirrors the mirror.' Or the media, including itself: FILE 'uses media as a format, available tradition, not as a creative medium.' There's nothing new in anything FILE has to say. It's all been done before. Image Bank's concern with the colour scale, Dr. Brute's interest in perspective table, dissected the art of seaming with an axe.' These lines allude to an unmentionable crime perpetrated by Pascal, by means of allusion to a definition of art too famous to quote. 'Is Willoughby Sharp rongWrong?' asks FILE. No, we answer to this academic question, rongWrong was a famous Dada publication. The name and leopard-skin obsessions of Dr. Brute call to mind the bruitist poetry pioneered by the European Dadaists; Jean Dubuffet's interest in l'art brut (the art of psychotics and children; grafitti); a remark made by Else Lasker-Schuler about the writing of Gottfried Benn: 'Every line a leopard's bite!' FILE is nothing more than the sum of its footnotes. General Idea plays its games of emptiness and allusion in the junkyard of history's industry, builds its castles and forts from the gossip and rumours history has forgotten.                                                            * FILE Megazine (as in megaton, megalith, etc.) is the vector over which the folklore of the eternal network is gathered, distributed, recorded, shared. The letters to the editor record the ordinary contacts among the border dwellers, and raise them to the scale of planetary event. The letters to the editor, mythology in the making; a way to mythologize the self. The articles document events from the point of view of the gossip columnist, derive from the event its significance, not for history, but for the endless evolution and devolution of energies known as the eternal network. Cf. Granada Gazelle's coverage of the Women's Film Festival, entitled 'Women and Film, Toronto, June 8-17, 1973,' which appeared in FILE September, 1973. Sample captions:

'Sharon Singer, formerly with Film Canada, now a booker for International Tele Film, searches the opening night crowd for Noah Dakota.' 'At the grand opening night party is French charmer Mireille Dansereau, whose film La Vie Revée started the festival. Granada's camera caught her with an unidentified beau.' 'April Stanley, that petite bundle of dynamite marked 'Danger', teases photographer Granada Gazelle with Cathy McTavish's xerox views of Noah Dakota.'

It is interesting to compare Ms. Gazelle's commentaries with Judy Steed's reflections on the same event, published last summer in THIS MAGAZINE, in which Ms. Steed dwells almost entirely on the American takeover she saw surfacing everywhere. Between Granada Gazelle's preoccupation with the mythology of the Women's Film Festival and Judy Steed's political concern there exists a no-man's-land which neither will ever cross. The distance between the sensibilities here represented is the distance between the Neolithic and Industrial Revolutions, between myth and history, between a consciousness shaped on the last of emptiness (Ms. Gazelle's) and one imbued with a seriousness of purpose and rationality of perception that has its origin in the birth of the West at Miletus and its end in the rebirth of the general idea. The world Ms. Steed recognizes passes away, and is replaced with the aeon of Granada Gazelle, whose herald and revelation is FILE Megazine.

6
. . . & what did you think of jack
burnham's suggestion that dan flavin is the 'conscience
of contemporary art'? i was, for a while, heavily
into flavin's work & especially his relationship to the
scholastic philosophers, & all the other medieval
theology i am trying to move beyond, without much success.
cf. flavin's pious quoting of ockham: 'posit no more
entities than are necessary' also known as ockham's
razor, slashing through 19th century decoration &
sophistication of ornament, to get us down to the
basic thing. voila! modernist architecture & minimal
art, & the whole 'form-follows-fuction', 'less-is-more'
syndrome of uglification. (i love robert venturi's '
less is boring'.)

what's really fantastic to me about FILE is
the way it so happily snaps ockham's razor, & gets back
to 'more is more, & more fun, too'. venturi talks
about the way a story is always more interesting for
having been passed around. (his example in learning
from las vegas is the florida motel that is simply
more entertaining than the corbusier original . . .

i.e., the passage from high-art architecture to
vernacular architecture has done for the structure
idea what being passed-around does for gossip).
it seems to me that the central editorial standard
for submissions to FILE is that they have got to be
good, i.e. possessed of that delightful phoniness
that can only come to a story as it passes through
many hands; in other words, as it becomes
validated by repetition. (similarly, myths have their
validation in their being remembered, retold. a story
has really got to be good . . . open to elaboration &
sophistication. . . to stay in the primitive image
banks.) the trouble with the libraries is that they
keep everything, whether it's interesting or not.
oral culture doesn't have this hoarding compulsion.
what's not interesting is forgotten.

general idea is the restitution of that
old sorting process, which is an alternative to the
aggressive slashing of ockham's razor. onward
to the neolithic revolution, to the miss general idea
pavilion of 11,984 BC, or Lascaux.

The problem: how to deconceptualize and resensualize the life along the borderline; a reconditioning of response. (How, in other words, to deal with the residual guilt and responsibility that are obsolete, now that God, ultimate meaning, etc. have absented themselves from our experience of the world.) A first step: deal with everything in the new ways demanded by the absence. Regard all surfaces as sensual surfaces, the world as erogenous zone; halt at the surface. Persons are mere objects, the sum of their surfaces and decorations, nothing more. This involves a deep ascesis, a renunciation of the hermeneutic approach which is the legacy of modern psychology, sociology, politics, literary criticism; the re-establishment of a total erotics of perception. This involves a new vocabulary, one which names things not according to their meanings, but according to the acts which things document. Cf. the endless taxonomic researches of General Idea.                                                            * 'Myth is essentially the naming of parts. . . . The logic of myth is the logic of connection. Image making room for words. Naming the partz, sensing the network working, plugged into the subliminal. The key to this logic is the Borderline situation, a neither one nor the other, camouflaged indifference, mirror mirror on the wall.' To the end of making visible the connections of the re-imaged borderline (the borderline as centre of attention as in, for example, the paintings of Jules Olitski), General Idea gathers from the eternal network an inventory of stock phrases, clichés, labels which have been validated by long usage as true descriptions of the new situation. FILE documents the unceasing emergence, refinement, and obsolescence of these terms of order.

*

. . . & i thought, while we're
on the topic of the way primitive peoples name
things--i think that your work with navajo
ethnobotany is terrific, what i've seen of it, as
key to the whole structure of consciousness
that names, i.e., what happens at the flash-point
of recognition in the navajo mind--while we're on
that topic, you might like to see some notes
i've been doing on the ethnotaxonomy of general idea.
they are working out the lineaments of a whole
world by using the same old language we use
on the world we've got, for which see the following.

up front: as in 'the obsessions are streaming up front'. on the surface, the first thing you see. up front, in the way the electric signs on yonge street or broadway are up front, doing what they do: making desire visible, letting you know what you want before you ask, letting them know they can get it here. when it's all up front, there's nothing out back. image: in the p.r. sense of it. the particular visual quality of what has come up front, the visual forms it takes. documentation of all the history that has gone into making the image: it's all there. a way to be free of whatever history you have been born into, by moving into the decor of your own choosing. documentation of the act of choosing, i.e., of a wholly voluntaristic theory of what makes personality: you get the one you want, and to hell with genetics. the genes that count are the ones circulating around the image bank of culture: brooches, clothes, make-up, sexual styles, manners of speech (a.a. bronson once told me he wanted to say and write everything in the progressive mode). biological reality is irrelevant; you are what you eat (feuerbach) or what you wear (mays, after oscar wilde). o.d.: overdose, or overload. refers not to drugs but to that force which keeps the people of the borderline moving. try standing still on Broadway: instant image-overload, freak-out; this constant pressure is flip-side of the liberating aspect of image, is the burden of it. image-building and image-management has always within it this potential crisis: o.d. nature: the experience of the world as threat, specifically, to that which is human about us, or unnatural. questions; concepts & conceptualization; ordinary, 'natural' desires & expectations; history. any attempt to get back to basics, any reductivism. causality; humanistic values; theology; issues; official ideology & rationality. universities. (the total context of forces which violate the essential artificiality, pretense, & freedom of image.) the thing about image that causes overdose. culture: unnaturalness as a total style. business as usual: a sign hung outside a commercial establishment after a flood or fire. an ambiguous piece of information, containing within it both a cheerful announcement and an ominous reminder of the past catastrophe. despite all that nature has done, we're carrying on with culture, as per usual. business as usual is the apocalypse in retrospect, and a statement that the worst is over. 1984 (q.v.) is over, belongs to history, general idea declares that, now, everything's coming up roses. 1984: used to be symbol of the total conquest of culture by nature (q.v.). now seen by general idea as just another year, whose ordinariness they will celebrate by the opening of the miss general idea pavilion in 1984. in 1984 it'll be business as usual, just as it is in 1974: playing around with the artifacts & throw-aways, celebrating the splendid game of images. a date in the past & hence irrelevant. general idea marks 1984 on its calendar as the date of its birth, the year all Thales' dreams came true, then forgets about it: the future belongs to the pose, the surface, the theatre of desire & impulse; not to nature.                                                            * General Idea's taxonomy imprints its vision of the future upon the artifactual contours of the present. 'Image Bank's collection of rubber stamps is a brief description of their cosmology.' The documentation undertaken by General Idea is done with the soteriological end in view, as a ritual of sacramental identification with the reality documented. The new approach to the artifacts of the edge: no longer as things to be possessed, but now as fetishes which bear within them hidden meanings and are the centres of complex fields of energy and information not just about the past from which they come, but also about the future they point toward and disclose; mirrors through which we see the future, darkly; oracles and signs and omens. To identify with the fetish is to identify with the future. The fetish is to be worn and borne until the bearer becomes one with it. It's putting on an image and living with it. We are reminded here of the Barbus, the obscure artists' group who gathered in the studio of Jacques-Louis David at the beginning of the last century, who dressed in the style of pre-homeric Greece, and sought, in so dressing and behaving, the sacramental unification of their secular space with the sacred space of the ur-time. The natural descendent of the Barbus is General Idea, which performs in the warehouse of the twentieth century's end and dresses in the garments and ideas of the future.                                                            * The central project of the West is the suppression of the presences and forces whose visibility disrupts the West's claim to unity and unification. Against these forces, its armies, universities, corporations, religions, and police are mobilized. But the people of the borderline have no such protection against the fetishes who bear within them the energy of the future as well as the dark force of the past. These fetishes, these throwaways — styles, souvenirs, sensibilities, artifacts — are, first of all, dangerous bearers of history: 'the past made ruler of the present, endowed with properties of cause and effect that is control that relinquish our need to responsibility for our self and our own." The problem thus created is confronted by General Idea directly: by 'retracing our footsteps into the mirror for a rehearsal of the past times,' by embracing the past times as one way to exorcise the succubus of history. Thus General Idea robs the fetishes of their power as magical environments (as agencies of cultural o.d.), transforms thereby their historicity into just one more component of their physical presences. say, back to General Idea again, and out again on the invisible network of need. Wearing the Nessus'-shirt of history, General Idea strides forth on the subliminal toward the future, and suddenly the shirt becomes a transparent medium of the images of the future.                                                            * 'We re-establish our ability to see with a long look into a mirrored mirror, passing through silvered slivered splintered layers of apparent transparency, moving within the arena of our affliction.' The arena: the borderline, the margin, the edge. General Idea leaves the expressway of mainline culture to re-establish their collective ability to see; takes up residence in the timeless zone along the roadside, among the signs. Up front, in the informational zone between culture and nature. Robert Venturi: 'Movement perception along a road is within a structural order of constant elements -- road, sky, lamppost spacing and yellow stripes.' Movement along the borderline is, similarly, within the simple inven-tory of informational objects: the fetishes. On the borderline, General Idea discovers art as 'a system of signs in motion, as an archive and indicator and stabilizer of culture, as a means of creating fetish objects, as residence for a field of imagery defining a culture . . . .'                                                            * Walter Benjamin: 'The unique value of the "authentic" work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.' The image in motion along the borderline, the self moving through the panoply of appearances, of sexual and social rites, of transformations, renewals, disintegrations, recreations, the loss of unique identity and the acquisition of new roles until the self is lost in the eternal network: life as art, art as life, the failure of distinctions. Along the eternal network, which circles the world like an equator of energy, the images, the people bearing the images, cluster and disperse: from Toronto's General Idea to Vancouver's Western Front, through Metromedia, A Space, the New York Corresponge Dance School of Vancouver, Fat City School of Finds Art, Ant Farm, Coach House Press, Fluxus West, Fluxus East, Aktual-USA, Trans-canadian Fluxus Ltd., The Northwest Mounted Valise of New Jersey, back to General Idea again, and out again on the invisible network of need.

*

. . . the ritual, the image bank
of primitive cultures, which is like what General Idea
does, & the eternal network occasionally does.
cf. the gala miss general idea pageant back in '72,
the coach-house press annual picnic-event, or
g.i.'s occasional breakfast-parties, etc.,
as opportunities for the parade of images, moments
of recalling, recharging, discharging the image-
energies.

further to the same line of thinking: what FILE
says about rituals, which could be straight
out of levi-strauss, viz:

1. 'the ritual, accumulating about and releasing the resident imagery beyond the mere objectification offered by fetish objects' — i.e., releasing the power of the fetish. 2. 'the ritual re-enacts an activity repeated in the past and known to repeat in the future, the ritual enacts the past as present, enacts the future as present establishes the time continuum as a complex network of ongoing presents' 3. 'the fetish object is the intersection of potent images, naming of partz accumulated about a convenient pole' the social rite as a festive taxonomy                                                            8 To name is to claim for culture that which has hitherto belonged to nature; to transform from fact to datum. To name is to identify, or mask; to render something comprehensible in the ambit of culture. To name is to render the ground on which the name is placed invisible. Making information from sensory facts is the way men distance themselves from the factuality of nature.                                                            * Robert Venturi points out that, on the Las Vegas strip, 'casinos whose fronts relate so sensitively to the highway turn their ill-kempt backsides toward the local environment, exposing the residual forms and spaces of mechanical equipment and service areas.' This is to say that the new informational surface, turned toward the trajectories of man, renders the old mechanical-age space visually/sensually obsolete, a mere support system for the interesting business up front, which is image. In the same way, paleolithic man's application of image and sign to the cave-wall dematerializes the wall. Moving through the torturous intestines of the Lascaux cavern, one is aware only of the splendid imagery; the cave-wall is thus distanced by the human, informational layer. General Idea's single-minded attention to the sensual surface of the body and the decoration of that surface renders the body as biological/historical organism obsolete. Decoration, or glamour, is the definitive strategy against the oppressions of history. Robert Venturi writes that 'essential to the imagery of pleasure-zone architecture is lightness, the quality of being an oasis in a perhaps hostile context, heightened symbolism, and the ability to engulf the visitor in a new role.'                                                            * Moving glamour to the forefront reverses the modernist pre-occupation with what Venturi has called 'the inherent, physiognomic characteristics of form', and heralds the appearance of a total style whose fundamental principle is the communication of information 'through allusion to previously known forms'. (cf, the architecture of Venturi & Co.) It's all a matter of transforming the manner in which one is beheld: sincerity yields to image, 'the real me' to the 'designed me', a moving beyond mere survival into transcendence, or glamour. Glamour as the exercise of the priesthood of culture against the dark forces of nature, naturalness, things as they are; alchemy, a compas-sionate resumption of base things into higher forms. The shining example of General Idea's eucharistic alchemy is Pascal. From the lead of a boring and ignorant man, General Idea has fashioned the gold of Pascal, 'chanteuse, general muse, genre-blur extraordinaire', heroine of the Toronto scene, and FILE superstar. But, like all fetishes, the glamourous image of Pascal bears a peculiar ambivalence and ambiguity: she is both a radiant picture of what is possible for human being and a tragic figure of past history. To put this another way, we can say of Pascal what Ken Jacobs once said of his film BLONDE COBRA: 'It is a work of life being crushed, but winning by virtue of the audacity of its own self-statement.'                                                            * Make-up as eschatology. Make-up or perish. General Idea believes in wearing the future on its sleeve and on its face. In Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss says of the Caduveo Indians of Brazil: 'Great indeed is the fascination of this culture, whose dream-life was pictured on the faces and bodies of its queens [by means of elaborate symbolic drawings], as if, in making themselves up, they figured a Golden Age they would never know in reality.' The pioneer sociologist J.M. Guyau once defined art in a way that provides the link between the artists of primitive Brazil and post-modernist Toronto: as that 'extraordinarily intense form of sympathy and sociability which can satisfy itself only by creating a new world.' The palm-tree imagery in A.A. Bronson's jewelry and clothes; the allusions to the Paris of Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, and Radclyffe Hall in the wardrobe of Granada Gazelle; the rhinestones, furs, and elegant clothes of Noah Dakota: these images are made from dreams of the past which are visions of a future Golden Age of leisure and graciousness which, because they are artists in a philistine society of book-keepers, they will never know in reality. It is worth noting here that the root of cosmetics is cosmos: the world not as object of discovery, but as the subject of an endless task of ordering and tending. Make-up is making the world.                                                            * Live out your fantasies. When in Paris (FILE advises), 'affect the borderline case. Consider the coupling of viewed and voyeur, subject and object posed as event. Consider your experience in Paris a network of unique, discrete, of coupling events. Consider Paris a description of vision: French letters, French toast, French love.' When in Paris 'pause to consider your stance. Affect the artist in the city of love. Visit the Louvre. Investigate the Ruse de Neslé. Pose in front of the Eiffel Towel, pencil in hand, immersed in thought. Before applying pencil to paper, consider your stance in the face of art. Are you drawing a distinction or defining an edge? Be bold. Create a universe.' Now live out your fantasies in Toronto. You are General Idea, creating a universe. No subject, no object in this theatre: the mails have no centre, the postcards circulate, opening you to the world and the world to you, abolishing distance, the aura of the uniquely-located art-object, and hence abolishing all the old metaphors of art. You are General Idea, evidence and surety of retribalized consciousness, whose planetary coinage is gossip, the anecdote, mythology and rite: evidence and surety of the future. You are General Idea, appropriating from the myth of Toronto the Good the materials of your vision: the bathos, the predictability, the small gesture and low profile; searching in the scenes, among the artifacts for the spirit of what the city will be; hunting the spirits that haunt you, gathering hints about yourselves.                                                            * There is no turning back. You have gone too far. General Idea, the eternal network: a vast game of masks, which accomplishes what masks accomplish for the self: apocalypse and eclipse, disclosure and occultation, the dissolution of identity, authority, and authorship, new identities and destinies. But this is no easy game: as the Mayan myth Charles Olson retells has it, one has to act out his mask; for better or for worse. One has to go the whole route of it, through the entire comic and tragic trajectory mapped out by the chosen decor. Image responsibility: the necessity of being seen, of bearing one's inventory of obsessions publicly, without reserve; the responsibility, the price you pay for daring to transcend history. There is no way out; or, there is no way back in, once the step out on to the subliminal has been taken.                                                            * 'The obsessions are streaming up front.' The psychosis of history now lived as theatre; 'the disease that is man' (as Nietzsche called us) publicly flaunting his illness in history, his perversions, hidden dilemmas of desire, fetishisms. Getting it all up front: in the eternal network there are no private parts. Going public, coming out of the closets and into the streets: the image request list, 'the amplification of each participant's habit', which is published in each issue of FILE: Dawn in San Francisco wants used toothpicks of Albert Fine. Richard Gutman of Boston wants images of roadside diners. Marcia Herscovitz of London, England, wants fake Ray Johnson letters. David Livingston of Toronto wants Raggedy Ann, Kitty Wells (and other honky-tonk angels), tea towels. Peter Linsky of Ferndale, Michigan, wants images of Rowdy Rabbits, especially with hand drawn sex organs; opera stuff. Fig Ruther of Toronto wants photos of warm interesting ageless people, and anything art deco. J. Raymond of Berkeley wants belly button lint and images of prominent navels. Pat Tavenner of Oakland, California, wants form letters; poison pen pal letters; legal, illegal, put-on, proverbial letters; angry and redneck letters. Vince Aletti of New York wants Puerto Rican polaroid pornography. The image request list: a way to bring together the obsessed around the object of their obsession; a means of gathering the fetishes; a way to spread your disease: 'image is virus'.

*

dear a.a.,

i'm writing you in this late night a letter you will
never get from me, just to get it out of my
system, since i'm stalled on the point of it.

i'm incapable of seeing a palmtree without
thinking of you, palmtrees on rum bottles, on travel
posters, in the backgrounds of photos in the books
on aztec art i've been reading, on the warm southwestern
coast of Ireland, in florists' shops, in pictures of
the triumphal entry of christ into jerusalem:
they are casting down palm-branches at his feet, but
it's you I'm thinking of.

you have reduced an entire biological
species to just another element in your personal decor.
you have made yourself a part of every scene in which
there is a palm tree, everywhere in the world,
simultaneously.

i think i've discovered how general idea
plans to take over the world, & i've learned that the
hard way, by becoming a victim in the germ-warfare
of images.

Who is Noah Dakota? Who is Jorge Saia? Who is Ron Gabe? Each is nothing more than the psychopathology of his everyday life, the anecdotes told about him on the scene and on the eternal network, the things known about him constellated in the fetish-object of a name. Each is invisible beneath the image he affects, and is. Each is one element in the plastic/dynamic hieroglyph of General Idea. Who is General Idea? It is nothing more than the psychopathology of those who make up its everyday life, the anecdotes told about them on the scene and on the eternal network, the things known about them constellated in the fetish-object of a name. It is invisible beneath the image it affects, and is. It is one element in the plastic/dynamic hieroglyph of the Eternal Network. Who is the Eternal Network?                                                            9 It's all a matter of how one is beheld. What's more than skin-deep is irrelevant. General Idea's vision of glamour as a strategy of transcendence replaces Oscar Wilde's 'importance of being earnest' with Daphne Marlatt's 'importance of being seen', as the last ethical demand before ethics itself is displaced by sheerly sensuous appeal as the final authority for human existence. It's all a matter of surfaces: 'Concerning the mechanics of vision it is necessary to see that a shift in realities is simply shifting seeing.' Or shifting images.                                                            * The project of the cave-painters of Lascaux and that of General Idea is the same: to glamourize the face of nature and thereby render it invisible; to give to the visible body its rightful place as centre of the rite and general dance. 'This is all beyond distinctions. As Jean Dubuffet, whose life and work anticipate so clearly those of General Idea, has written: 'I don't worry about [objects] being ugly or beautiful; furthermore these terms are meaningless for me . . . . I have liked to carry the human image onto a plane of seriousness where the futile embellishments of aesthetics no longer have any place, onto a plane of high ceremony, of solemn celebration, of helping myself with what Joseph Conrad calls: "a mixture of familiarity and terror" . . . My position is exclusively that of celebration.' General Idea pronounces life as the only work of art worth the trouble, and dedicates itself to this project of utter transformation: 'FILE . . . for those to whom living is a fine art.'

*

dear richard:

'glamour is the interface between nature & culture'

i don't think i ever understood this sentence, which the
general idea people endlessly repeat, until i read,
while on holidays in Ireland last year, that chapter
in tristes tropiques where levi-strauss describes
the caduveo indians of brazil. here's some notes that
i think will be relevant to what general idea is
thinking about here.

according to levi-strauss, the caduveos
viewed everything 'natural' with horror. he says that
infanticide & abortion were so common as to be
normative for this tribe. (they sustained
the tribe's continuity by ripping-off babies
from other people.) (well, what does that make the caduveos
anyway, except a collage of other people as
general idea says: collage or perish.)

anyway, getting back to the point of this
unnaturalness, not only did they not like the 'natural'
functions of the body, but they did not like the
natural form of the body either (i.e., that
'inherent, physiognomic form' robert venturi
talks about) — so they tried to disguise the body as
much as possible by means of elaborate painting, or makeup.

levi-strauss quotes the 18th c. jesuit sanchez-
labrador: who observed that each caduveo 'sees himself
as an Atlas who bears, not only upon his hands &
shoulders but upon his whole body, the weight
of a clumsily charted universe.' & levi-strauss
comments: 'And this may, indeed, explain the
exceptional character of caduveo art: that it makes
possible for Man to refuse to be made in God's image.'

a little farther on, levi-strauss
delivers the punch-line: 'Painting was a part of manhood;
not to be painted was to be one with the brutes . . .
The face paintings confer upon the individual his
dignity as a human being: they help him cross
the frontier from Nature to culture, and from the
"mindless" animal to civilized Man.'

out of this comes the fundamental equations
or formulae with which general idea works its
particular sorcery of culture, viz. ,

the more unnatural one is, the more human he is.

to be human is, fundamentally, to be unnatural .

the way to make one human is to make one
glamourous; glamourizing is transcendence.

& we are up against it again, the
old problem of how the ideology of naturalness, natural
law, inalienable human dignity, etc. came
to be viewed as the proper vision of our self-
transformations.

for if the caduveos & general idea are
right, the appropriate humanizing is a dehumanizing,
a de-naturalization, a de-conditioning from
all this business about individuality, personal
freedom, etc.; a process of making ourselves more
artificial, bizarre. it would seem that the
human is realized in the world when what malinowski
called 'the coefficient of weirdness' comes to
characterize all human thought, speech, &
historical existence.

(footnote: remember the context
in which malinowski talks about that coefficient of
wierdness? he's talking about the peculiar
quality that gives the power to the word-
juxtapositions in primitive chants,
incantations, spells — words out of
context, randomly organized & intoned: which
reminds me of those dada poems which
are just collages of sound, & what the 'four
horsemen' have been up to in toronto
for a while now, & of general idea's dicta:
cut up or shut up, collage or perish
the human is the random, disorganized, 'weird'
collocation of pre-existing elements, like
a collage; it is, like a collage,
real to the extent that it possesses
the old coefficient.)

general idea's pre-occupation with glamour,
weirdness & unnaturalness brings it together, not merely
with the caduveos & other primitive people — i've been
seeing this pre-occupation in more & more north
american Indian tribes, since reading tristes
tropiques — but also with that ancient myth in our own
tradition, which envisions the final
human face as that of the transvestite, the androgyne,
the polymorphous-perverse child of aquarius.

if our history, particularly the
history of our bodies, is tending toward this end — if
there is, in other words, a message about the future
in the polymorphous sexuality of the present, the
place to look for signs & omens is not in the books of
fuller or mcluhan or jacques elluil or toffler —

the standard fare of academic futurology — but in the
face of Pascal, in our own sensual stirrings,
in the lives of those who are, at this time,
living the future as a present & forging the post-
human, unnatural modalities of experience which i
believe will replace that old history we have
been living since thales as surely as that
primal unnaturalness, or crime, committed a
million years ago made us man in the first place.

you can feel the future, but you can't read
about it. it's beyond words, from now on.


10

In his dialogue 'On the failure of the oracles', Plutarch tells the story of a sailor who, one quiet evening on the sea, heard a loud voice calling out, 'Great Pan is dead!' The incident became so famous that the emperor, Tiberius Caesar, ordered an investigation; scholars were given the problem of what this cry might mean. In our own time, we hear the cry again, and are called to think of it. We hear voices everywhere in our liberal civilization announcing the death of all the comprehending images and metaphors that have been used to subdue the polymorphousness of reality. Myths resurge to complicate matters; god, the universe, the unified personality of bourgeois psychology are dead; great Pan is dead. How we regard the cry discloses where we stand: in the dying West, or in the tune beyond it. We balance on the threshold, or borderline. But in the mixed terror and exhilaration of this critical moment, we cannot fail to hear another voice inviting us to the festival beyond the death of God: 'Welcome to la region centrale with no periphery and no division. This is no compromise. This is beyond words.'                                                            * This is beyond words. All the boundaries, abolished. All the rules, repealed. ' . . . there is no longer a possibility of problems and solutions but rather the necessity of a mass a dense and knitted fabric of a network of alternative myths alternative lifestyles alternative methods of approaching the problem of nothing.' 'Counterfeit! Interphase! Camouflage! Interpolate! Recycle!' Ritual directions for life on the new stage, tactics designed to 'erase the timegap between past and future, to erase then that sense of progress of historical process —' Go to pieces. Make-up. Collage or perish. Cut up or shut up. Cut up and shut up. (This is beyond words.) 'The Great Divide was words and it was words that conquered time and space and put them in their place of black on white. After observation came cut up or perish and we joined the ranks and called it collage.' On the borderline between history and the inhuman future (or myth), facing both ways at once, neither one nor the other, collaging the artifacts for hints and rumours, General Idea researches the transformations, and beholds in them the future abolition of all our western works of will and their own works as well, which are, after all, still in words and works. The windows of General Idea open toward the future. The mirrors of General Idea catch glimpses of the future and reflect them into the eye of the eternal network. But General Idea is not the future. The future is beyond words.

Open Letter, Second Series #8, Summer, 1974. Text: © John Bentley Mays. All rights reserved.