Well, tumblr. It’s been a few weeks. Perhaps we shall investigate the weird fringe of my thoughts again.

Creation is an interplay between culture, creator and audience. Our goal, then, is for a creation that produces a query in the mind of the audience, an explosive asking of ‘Why?’ or ‘What?’ or ‘How? When? Where?’ The answer is immaterial. The question is the product. Leave it to the audience to answer. The human mind is predictable. For the same reason we pick incessantly at a scab, we ask the same questions, until we are satisfied. It is our purpose to create the milieu in which the unanswerable, the difficult questions are asked.

We are embarking on a post-politics. The old politics relies on direct action by blocs. Trade unions, pressure groups, lobbyists. These categories became dysfunctional almost at their very inception. The category of worker no longer functions in a world in which work no longer defines identity. Pressure groups reflect the opinions of an individual, and so on and so forth. The only accurate reflection of the needs of the individual is within the mind of the individual. To create something that speaks to the individual that creation must work on multiple levels. It must be obscure, ambiguous, impenetrable. It is the folly of human beings to construct and construe meaning from the meaningless – we seek patterns. Then, and only then, is the truly political artwork produced. The culture jam – appropriating the mechanisms for inappropriate purposes – is the fundamental unit of this art. Obscure, impenetrable, even silly, the culture jam posits a site at which the things that are taken for granted do not function any more. The question is, why?

We begin with the precept established by Baudrillard: That the end of History is the recitatum of History. Representation is existence. All that can be depicted is depicted, all that is depicted elides that which is depicted. We endlessly seek escape beyond the bounds of History by cannibalising our shared past.

There is no revolution, no becoming…. The politics of dream. (Hakim Bey)

The manufacture of ideology through technology, its rapid dissemination through the vector-arcs of electronic media and its reinforcement in the echo chamber of the 24-hour news cycle. We adopt culture only as it is presented in broadband, picking-and-choosing but never remembering. China becomes a chain-smoking child, Africa a plastic horn, bleating its disenfranchised corporatist song to the world.

The homosexual is clad in day-glo rainbows, the transgender a tiny flash of maybe-penis in a staged display. Representation is reality, reality is dream, dream is future, future is past, past is present, present is representation.

The new media monolith is a three-minute video, shot on the black obelisk cellphone. Israeli soldiers dance and hold hands in Palestinian streets where crowds once cheered the collapse of the towers. The towers fall endlessly, every moment of past and future History collapsing under the weight of concrete, steel, dust and ash. The rock thrown by a child is the aeroplane plunging through office blocks, the unmanned drone scything down a wedding party is Richard Lionheart’s sword cleaving limbs at Al ‘Ayadieh. We no longer repeat the mistakes of history, or allow them to drive us to new experience or new discovery. Instead, we reenact that history as History, recycled entire, the eternal NOW from which we cannot progress without extricating ourselves entire. Apocalypse. To establish our [U-Dys-Un-No-Noo]topia we are required to project a radical break from History and Culture At The Speed Of Light.

Culture At The Speed Of Light is culture subjected to Einsteinian Relativity. To those of us travelling within Culture it appears to be moving at its normal pace. The Universe is standing still. However the Universe is carrying on at its normal pace, while we are completely absorbed in circular, endless, recitatum - forward movement is illusory, retrograde movement equally so. To exit this illusory whirl we must either stop dead or project ourselves beyond the speed of light to beyond the moment of History - a sudden jolt flings the scanning laser beyond the surface of History’s spinning disc. Apocalypse.

We have established beyond doubt that the map not only precedes the territory, but that the map and the territory are one and the same. The territory, the terroir of the hyperreal, hyperspeed History is indistinguishable from the real or imagined map that we inhabit. So it is that carbon pollution is necessary, that we have always been at war with Eastasia, that Afghan refugees must be sent back to the war they escape because it is THEY who are fighting US. This is cognitive dissonance. It is the natural state of the apocalyptic - one must hold dear a view that is at its baldest statement entirely contradicted by observation. Observation of a reality, whether ones own or received from a trusted source, is established to fit the Historical reality of our personal territory. This places September 11 as a sinkhole of History, a resonant sonar ping into the dark water of Historical Time, casting its echoes forward, backward, onward and outward and casting its own reflection on lived experience. Vietnam is rewritten as a Gulf War, Afghanistan becomes the Taliban’s mechanism to crush the Red Army, and tiny, secular North Korea funds globe-spanning networks of religious terrorism.

For Baudrillard, September 11 constitutes an irruption (eruption/interruption) of the Real into the Hyperreal, an anchoring moment at which events once more can occur in historical time. Instead, moments of defining human trauma are Events, anchors of ideology in frameworks of Historical power. The Event, as disruptive, hideous, painful and REAL as it may be, is a weapon through which millennial ideologies can be fired, the fire in the wake of its passage sweeping outwards through History to refigure, redeem and reshape. We cannot approach this as a vector, a single point-to-point transfer of ideology. We must speak of an arc, a vast tsunami of imposed narrative power which can touch any point in History. Ideology is the deadliest weapon in the millennial arsenal of power, never non-lethal, never defended against. It is carried in word and deed, in image and sound, willingly consumed, subsumed, assumed.