The ultimate aim of constructing situations – of overturning spectacles – of unitary urbanism and the continuous drift, of situography and psychogeography – can only be what the state defines as terrorism: actions that intend to “intimidate and target civilians with the aim of political change” – whether as psychic reproductive or destructive workers self organising – or even as interactive and collaborative public sound and visual art installations and performances around the city.
The psychogeographer (and all psychic workers) indeed must declare themself a terrorist. You, white, European and British psychogeographers of learning, academia, elevated culture, fine art, ruling class ideology etc. Not because you are murderous and illegitimate but because you want change and you want to confront people with the truth. Even within your dead bourgeois ideas is that of the bourgeois revolution and of “the terror” that engendered it. Terrorism, as you know it, does not exist outside of ideology and reification. It is wholly a state fabrication – a racist white supremacist and patriarchal fabrication used in order to delegitimise organised resistance to capitalism patriarchy and white supremacism. And so the only option for you now is to take on this mantle for yourself.
Because its use in the UK today, as an Islamophobic construct, applied immediately to any brown or black peoples who engage in general criminal activity especially national liberation struggle is not so different from how it was used against Irish people in the UK previously. And indeed against South American liberation fighters by the USA. As an Islamophobic construct today it is wielded not just by UK USA NATO – but also by other imperialist and capitalist powers eg Russia (Chechneya) Israel (Palestine) China (Uigur) India (Kashmir)
its success as a construct depends on its vagueness – defined as the use of violence by a non state actor to bring about change in state policy – it can easily include most forms of peaceful protest and democratic processes. Indeed the prevent framework has already criminalised various left wing political groups who advocate NVDA – non violent direct action – and therefore the definition of violence is not just spurious and controversial but antithetical to opposing political perspectives.
The avant-garde had realised this back in the 80s – before the war on terror began – and so there had begun a kind of “negative reclamation” by the avant-garde, ie radical and self organised left, Anarchist and Communist, art movements in the west – Hakim Bey’s “Poetic Terrorism” (1985), Heath Buntings “Cultural Terrorist Agency” (1999) or Stewart Homes “Mind Invaders: A Reader in Psychic Warfare, Cultural Sabotage and Semiotic Terrorism” (1997) show how this was a conceptual tool with a wide range of applications in terms of performance art, interventionist art and activism, by which the contemporary avant garde was formulating its opposition to culture.
Like many parts of society, after 9-11 and the start of the “war against terror” buy the USA, this position for the avant garde became increasingly tenuous and the arrest of various artists under terror charges. Its no surprise that it was a defender of bourgeois art like Stockhausen who claimed 9-11 as a triumphant “work of art” itself. This in itself is nothing new for avant-garde debates about modernity and art but it is evident that the use of “shock” in the media by Stockhausen was used ot instrumentalise prejudice against art workers. The most known immediate target was Streve Kurtz, arrested in the USA along with other members of the Critical Art Ensemble in 2001. Heath Bunting, who was also researching into genetic and biological art, was also arrested during this period and was banned for life from the USA.
Some other groups also continued with a radical and direct avant-garde political and cultural confrontation of the state myth of terrorism, such as Space Hijackers (for example buying a tank to bring to the arms fair protests in 2005), c6.org (with their bombsoho, bomblondon graffiti campaigns in 2002-3). More recently the Asemic International released their “Terrorist Manifesto of Asemic Writers” which the psychic workers union DAMTP published as a provocation at Kassel in 2017. There are of course many many examples continuing around the world – and the so-called Post-Soviet Actionist movement has been one of the main fronts of this kind of work during the period of very high handed state control in the west. Artists such as Oleg Senstov (arrested under terror charges in 2015, Ukraine) and of course Pyotr Pavlensky continue to be censored by the state using terrorist legislation as their tool.
The only option we see for you in this situation is to take on the mantle of terrorist. And thus renounce the possibility of its spurious application to others.
Asemic institute of comparative vandaliSm, actionism and poetIc, semiotic and cultural terrorisM