Description
Publisher:
Eldon Garnet.
Editors:
Eldon Garnet and Carolyn White.
Associate Editors:
Judith Doyle and Gerald Owen.
Contributing Editors:
Sylvère Lotringer (New York) and Joan (Adair) Brouwer (London).
Art Direction:
Carolyn White.
Contributing Designer:
Ken Baird.
Production Technician:
Robert Labossiere.
Editorial Assistant and Business:
James Gronau.
Computer Keyboard Operator:
Wendy White.
Mascot:
Money (Bunny Freed).
Table of Contents:
Edward Slopek, ‘TV Scanners Entraining: Going Berserk On The Crest Of The Third Wave’; Andy Payne, ‘Father, Discourse and Identity: Notes Towards A Reading Of Hamlet’; Gerald Owen, ‘The Neo-Conservatives’; Andrew James Paterson, ‘Love Songs’; Ara Rose Parker, ‘The Status Of Women’; Sylvère Lotringer Interviews Fadi Mitri, ‘Framing Death’; Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Right Time’; Donna Wyszomierski, ‘More Time On His Hands; ‘Ecological Disease’; Carolyn White, ‘Targeted Training’; Hans Haacke, ‘Voici Alcan’; Paul Collins, ‘Implied Writing’; Brian Boigon, ‘I Got The Frights’.
Editorial:
The demand for and the ability to create an improved state of physical and intellectual conditions are obstructed by the existing system in North America. The power structure conditions and enforces against change. Industrial government maintains, it does not attempt to extinguish itself in a radical transformation into the future.
The state exists in Law.
Law is clearly a necessity, yet contained in its structure are only the most conservative plans for the future. Law must focus on the present: empiricism not idealism is its guiding force.The lack of a poetic spirit is a lack of elasticity, an absence which tightens to rigidity; to be without the sense of impossible turns as the possible turns. Thinking is a set of rearrangements without rest.
One must be a constant juggler.The tyranny of power is in the solidification and maintenance of Law.
We in North America have always lived in Law; our only cultural revolution was to colonize and to order our natural environment. The electronic revolution could be considered our current cultural “revolution.” The giants of post-war Europe are slowly reorganizing after their recent industrial deaths. Very slowly. Industry is only beginning to replace its Luddite workers with robots. There is no spirit of cooperation or understanding between labour and management, no opportunity to interact for mutual improvement. The capitalist tradition of separating worker from capital has perpetuated a condition of non-cooperation. The idea: if I’m working for someone else I am not working for myself; if I’m working for myself I am working for myself.
We did not listen when Einstein elaborated on the metaphor of the bounded infinite. We remained non-Euclidean, flat beings with one dimensional implements free to move only in our plane.No one works alone.
Marketed computer software is idea, process for sale: labour for sale, idea.
The electron worker is changing our working world: organized white collar workers will create organized machines to build their physical world. It is this improved environment which we want to construct. With our knowledge.
The central political debate is being clouded by the noisy and bloody conflict of the two super systems. Both are calcified skeletons, frightening and destructive, clashing armies wasting away.
A cultural reorganization is needed as much as a physical retooling. The attitude of improving our physical conditions by creative planning and cooperative implementation is currently rare, but if it became commonplace in the future, replacing violent non-cooperation, we would suddenly be on a utopian course. It is far too simple and, of course, impossible. Someone firing a mortar shell in Lebanon would be justified in laughing at this naivete. But it is here in North America and in the current industrial nations of the world that the cultural revolution could take place, in the countries where the violence of war has been less local. Utopian, perhaps, but that is precisely the central point of the future. Why plan for a negative future; it is senseless to plan for failure.
The greatest power is that which is able to relinquish power.
Strength is not stubborn adherence to stability, to present power. To remain stable is only to incur deterioration either dramatically imploding or with creeping ossification and eventual crumbling.
Eldon Garnet
