ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XXI. WEAPONS of MASS DISTRACTION
We are the tool-using animal; we make ourselves by making our environment. Anyone who cannot participate, on a basic level, in the creation of their society is cruelly victimized by this fact. Slaves seek pleasure as a balm for their inequities, and then become addicted to whatever becomes their most effective escape. The source of pleasure becomes the source of paralysis. Addiction is the last link in the chain that starts with the alienation of the worker from the power of creation and from the collective. When we are denied access to social conceptualization, we're reduced to a pre-social, animalistic condition. The time vs. money double bind is the archetype of this dysfunctional relation. For an individual, freedom involves having both meaningful time and the resources to develop oneself, but the worker must buy the one with the other. For the boss it is 'heads I win, tails you lose.' A double bind is created when a person (or a class) is given two choices, both of which paralyze them. But the fact of the choice gives the illusion of freedom. "Work will set you free" was the slogan over the gate at Buchenwald.
One of the aspects of this delusionary mechanism is that the victim must participate in their own degradation. They must feel free to decide which kind of game they will play to distract themselves from their own misery. The worker is "free" to sell his or her labor, or body or soul, or not have a home, a family or a meal. People occasionally win the lottery, start businesses that make them rich, and become stars in Hollywood. There are entire industries that feed these dreams and hundreds more working class "personal escape" fantasies. Our experience tells us that the ride to work on the bus is the same now as it has been for twenty years and the same as it will be. But our head says it'll change soon, and if you're only a tourist in Hell, if your bags are packed and you've got a ticket "home", why rebel? The worker who plays the game by the rules develops two heads, one connected to the experience of everyday life, the other fetishizing a dream of escape. Progressive artists are de-programmers, whose job is to destroy the escapist head and amplify the other one, the one that is capable of confronting everyday realities - and rebelling.
The Gordian Knot myth is about riddles that can't be solved if you play by the rules. In ancient Gordium, a man named Gordius and his son Midas made a knot of their chariot's yoke so complex nobody could untie it. The legend grew that whomever could figure out and untie the knot would go on to conquer the East. Finally, Alexander the Great was shown the Gordian Knot. He studied it carefully, then drew his sword and cut it in half (naturally, he went on to conquer the East).
The capitalists, in times of relative social peace, use various techniques, weapons of mass distraction, to repress worker culture: "substitution" of other cultures, "revitalization" of some period of the past, "infantilization" of a potentially mature culture, "trivialization" or emphasis on irrelevant daily minutia of life, on gossip, on celebrity cult worship; and the grand old brutal stand-by, the flooding of our emotions in a tsunami of distractions provided by sports, crime and the so-called "entertainment" provided by Hollywood films and television. These all act subliminally to enhance the carrot of the "American Dream" mythos of success (wealth) through hard work, and the stick of punishment of failure (poverty) by "evil criminals" who prey on the working poor. (Trotsky once said that America is the only culture where someone is said to be "worth" a million dollars if they own a million dollars.) It goes without saying that the bosses will use more forceful means of control if and when they "need" to, and, under the pressure of the latest imperialist war, we're now experiencing a deepening of the contradictions between the myth of democracy and the reality of censorship and repression. But, at least for the short term, it can still be said that in our country we're rarely imprisoned for our ideas because we're already imprisoned by our ideas!
Revolutionary artists make a unity between ideas and experience, and we can create shared class identity by amplifying, in an epic way, the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Those who believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities, as Voltaire said. Thanks to the rise of the religious right, there now exists the threat of a new dark age, a devastating period of repression of science, culture and human rights. The main task of artists today is to make, out of the degradations of slavery, a heroic and militant slave culture. Only when this is accomplished will the creation of a classless, truly human art, be on the agenda.