First Manifesto of the Guerilla Plastique Fantastique: ‘On Baroque Practice’
1 Activate immanence. Turn away from transcendent modes and points of organisation, especially religion and art, but also fashion, the mass media and other telematic standardisations. Refuse the priests and the police; affirm bottom-up formations and traitor prophets. Celebrate the ‘isness’ of all things. We call for a turn to matter, and a tracking of the latter’s singularities and creative potentialities. Practice is the utilisation of that which already is (what else is there?) but in the production of new and specifically different combinations. Always affirm the eternal return.
2 Harness affect. Practice is the foregrounding of the world’s intensive and affective properties. We are subject to the ambient affect of fear generated by others. We turn this fear-affect-assemblage back on itself, mimicking and bastardising their languages and their techniques. Affects as that which constitute the objects of our practice (1) and affect as that which is ‘communicated’ through the work of the practice (2). (1) The practice will involve the production of novel constellations of affects, away from opinion, away from habit, away from the clichés of so-called culture (the affective assemblages offered to us on a daily basis). (2) The practice will operate as a rupture in our overly anxious, paranoid and stratified habits of being (the practice will affirm new kinds of joy, and new kinds of becoming). This is an aesthetics. We affirm the necessity of style in this harnessing of affect.
3 Build probe heads. The practice is an experimental device aimed at dismantling the strata that binds us and constitutes us as ‘human’ (our habitual states of being and responding). Probe heads against faciality (we curse the white man). In this practice both figuration and abstraction will be used (we will release the abstract from within the figurative). We offer access to the imperceptible from which the perceptible emerges and merges. We offer access to the unthought within thought, the nonsense within sense. And on the other side of the white wall? New territories, new polyvocalities.
4 Actualise the virtual. We locate the practice at that ‘seeping edge’ between the actual and the virtual. We turn away from the real and the possible as ontological co-ordinates for art (i.e. the clergy and their disciples). We attend to the ‘matrix of emergence’, the great screen that allows some things to pass, others to remain hidden (i.e. capitalism). And thus our practice is also one of deactualisation (the practice asks: how can we ‘escape’ the actual that surrounds us?) Our practice involves a switching of temporal registers, a speeding up, moving faster than any transcendent apparatus of capture, and also, a times, a slowing down, a remaining still. We open a gap between stimulus and reaction (i.e. creativity). We affirm speed, but also slowness and hesitancy. We are involved in mirror-travel and in the production of crystal objects.
5 Always stuttering, always stammering. Our practice is a collective enunciation, even when there is only one (we are always the group). Our practice is always linked to the larger political milieu (no oedipalisations and no nuclear families). Our practice as the general twisting, bending of a major language, a major tradition. The practice as centrifugal, reacting to, and attacking that which paradoxically produces the condition of possibility of the practice (parasitical function). The practice as centripetal, producing new forms and new modalities of being from within the same (germinal function). Always dissent and affirmation. Our practice is the precursor of that specifically immanent utopia to come, an exemplar of a new world that is already contained within this one. Our practice is a future fragment projected backwards in time. Stuttering and stammering we call forth the new clown-like people as the recipients of our practice. Take heed, for we are a sign, a warning.
6 Always folding. The inside as a fold of the outside (we howl with laughter at interiority and so-called ‘essence’). We hold that our practice is the production of new folds, new worlds arising from these folds, and new myths appropriate to these future worlds (we will use past forms and yesterday’s codes, but they will be made unrecognisable in their turn). The fold names our ontology, fractal and super-abundant (we believe in space and time travel conducted in the here and now). The fold names our processes of subjectivation, the relation we hold to ourselves, our capture of outside forces (everywhere we are subject to, but also subject producing). Our practice also affirms the ‘new’ folds of silicon with carbon, of the molecular, and of the secret fold at the heart of language – where language breaks free from meaning and cries like a wounded wolf.
Our practice is always one of ritual. We intend a performance that will allow those who dare participate to move from work time (utility) into sacred time (play). Our practice affirms transformation: we are concerned less with mundane consciousness than with cosmic consciousness. We believe in a baroque practice as the only appropriate response to these troubled and terror-stricken times.
