Press release
Embargo: Friday May 3 2002
Comrades:
We assert the immanence of ritual; a theatre of cruelty. On Friday May 3, 2002, Outer Spaceways Incorporated, with Richard Bussex, will be attempting to force an inversion of St. Paul's Cathedral in the City of London. We invite you to join them: all protagonists will be meeting on Fish Street Hill by the Monument at 11.15 am.
The action will effect through a process of deep antagonism; an act of planning, a privation of history and negation of the science of space. Richard Bussex will read an announcement at the Cathedral entrance (12 noon), before attempting to hand it to the Chaplain or nailing it to the door. The announcement will give the Bishop of London and his entourage one month's notice to quit. Vacation will enable the erasure of the Cathedral in accordance with "good health and safety practice".
Bussex states: "Do not touch me! Down in the hole, the gravedigger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries and society turns back upon itself. Pain has invaded the city and gapes at its heart".
Simulation! Deterrence! Implosion! Through the collision of simalcra a maximum of political energy may be found.
In erasing the Cathedral, the agency will assert the validity of the sacred enclosure (temenos) on Lud's Hill, revealed at the Great Fire of London in 1666. St. Paul's is built directly on the site. This enclosure is remarked by both E. O. Gordon (1925) and Allan V. Insole (1990), antiquaries of prehistoric and "aquarian" London. The London Stone, built into the wall of the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation on Cannon Street EC4, is noted as a pointer to the south east for the stone circle, leading in the direction of the rising sun at the winter solstice. The party will greet the stone en route.
The world moves with misery not haste. The Monument, built between 1671 and 1677, asserts the imposition by Charles II of regulatory constraints on construction in the City of London, in the wake of the rampant fire, and a demarcation of rights pertaining to property over the human subject. A regulation of surplus value, operating as a concern for the limitation of death in the face of catastrophe; a mediation of a speculative sector and class conflict recomposed.
So, white tennis shoes on! May we refer you back to your bookshelves. Power silently flounders on the silent majority. Baudrillard, Derrida and a precis Alvarez will do.
How will the erasure work? (You will note that this operation has been reduced somewhat formally).
A single blackbird clears its throat, bristling shadows thin. Tense. Working against the false appearance of the present, Bussex will assert a greater degree of presence or reality to the future present or past present. Death can wait, but Bussex must negate his own existence (and that of time) to effect the action. Time regains as eternity; space implodes and expands.
There is a centripetal configuration, with a cyclical/contra-cyclic dynamic. Or, if you prefer, temporal/ representational folding. The drama is alive.
His fingers, unformed, unerring. Mind rinsed with blood. Dematerialisation designed to return structuration to its proper element. Homogeneity. Resistance. Asphyxiation. Blood fails. STOP!
The totality precipitates a shrinking of the confines of energy, provokes a suction. Institutional excess, in its own interior compensating for space and rejecting the fact of its opening. Space slips away. Abstraction: concatenation/fragmentation? Turn the cosmos around and watch the goddess dancing.
And yet the structural site of this theological trap is nevertheless prescribed: the mark-supplement produced by the text's workings, in falling outside of the text like an independent object with no origin other than itself, a trace that turns back into a presence (or a sign), is inseparable from desire (the desire for reappropriation or representation). Or rather it gives birth to it and nourishes it in the very act of separating from it. Liminal prevarication, a contradiction of force. Cathedral and temenos oscillate.
The final sparks towards explosive transversal are logical. Implosion-explosion. Spatio-temporal inversion; exchange. An overpowering perpetuum mobile striving to consume itself.
Divided by fears and loss and ignorance, Bussex sets off the action, affirms the structures of his own totalising oppression, while simultaneously avoiding its content. The constraining of his libidinal self.
Boom. Acceleration. Jaw swings loose, eyes almost out; trunk stunned and stretched with a vibration sharper than fear, closer than pain. Tremor mortis, the last dissolution like loosening teeth in my head. Swimming toward me; numb. Glass block shatters. Seeping colours corrupting cheek wrist hand.
The real condenses, it must launch a contra force. VERTIGO! An uncontrollable eruption of reversability bombards. Negative contagion disorganises the whole ontological machine. So dense that it contravenes its own laws of equilibrium and involutes as it strives to re-equilibrate.
Again, the future present. The structure reveals itself. Church-State-Myth. St. Paul's Cathedral is due to be visited by the Queen on June 4, 2002. The ambivalent temporalities of the capital poise on the fissures of the present, become the rhetorical figures of an abstraction in the process of its own self recuperation. Every effort to save the principles of reality, of accumulation, of universality, can only be regarded as regressive or nostalgic.
Unbodied, like smoke in a crowd, Bussex turns. He vanishes.
A footnote: if necessary, the system will collapse merely under an excess of reality. At worst, in a final strike at the global social order, Her Majesty will be trapped in a euphoria of suspension, reflective repetition engendered by yourselves.
Automatism on the fringe of open complicity.
Castration.
Strike now!
Intermediate, and its sister organisation Project Mimique, states its jubilation at an action of such performative structuralist heresy. While we regard Mr. Bussex and his comrades as part and parcel of the institutions we detest - mythology is simply the reproduction in imagination of the problem in its insolubility - we will work without hesitation for their release after the event.
We must renew constantly our efforts to disrupt the reified structure of existence. The system can only be shaken from within, pushed irrevocably towards and through its points of tension, points located marginally, points condemned to a secondary function in a hierarchy. Thus we define the totality, the contingent tensions and divergents of the regulatory institutions reaching crisis; the dynamic of contradiction.
Society must exposed as a visible negation of life, a negation forming visible images of itself. Or rather, to leave aside the language of causality, it is necessary to advance the thesis that it is the imaginary nature of this relation, which underlies the hallucination, that we can observe in its ideology (if we do not live in its truth). Priests and despots! Oppose the repressive force of counter terrorist and "anti-social" legislation. Validate your subjectivity! Interpellate your own.
May we remind you of the plight of Islamic religious officials imprisoned without trial in the UK under the 2000 Terrorism Act, and the denial of the status as Prisoners of War to those held in Guatanamo Bay. We demand the immediate release of all.
Any donations will be thoughtfully forwarded on.
Guiding lines
Date of event: Friday May 3 2002
Location: City of London
Time: Meet 11.15 am Monument for 12 noon St. Paul's Cathedral
Duration: Approximately one hour
The event is mobile
Gather at the Monument (Fish Street Hill, EC3). The party will then proceed via the London Stone (wall of the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, opposite Cannon Street Station) to note a pleasing ambiguity; then onto St. Paul's Cathedral for 12 noon. An announcement will be nailed to the door of the Cathedral or handed to the Chaplain. Richard Bussex will read the proclamation to those assembled, and be on hand to answer your questions. Media representatives are welcome at any juncture. The party will be accompanied by rhythm courtesy of The Employment Agency (Solar Myth Arkistra); Bussex will be dressed as an angel (wings by Briand and Millerbrand).
A full text of the announcement will be available in printed form at the event, and online at <www.ourmayday.org/osw1.htm>
Intermediate.
Reflexivity is merely a fold of the text.
intermediate @ space.com