DESIRE IN RUINS

1 The whole of post-modern life is mediated by a series of abstractions. Creativity, pleasure, imagination, desire, all have a role to play in the maintenance of the capitalist system.

2 Those who do not reiterate accepted mystifications find their activities and ideas suppressed by both the media and the soft cops in the universities and community relations

3 In the past, life was mediated by such abstractions as honesty, truth, progress, and the myth of a better future. Creativity, pleasure, imagination and desire are a further refinement of this process. In the post-modern era, they serve the same function as progress &c., in the classical modern age (1909 - 1957).

4 Creativity is labour reified to moral good; the name of the work ethic after its modernisation. To those who oppose all moralisms, creativity is just as alienating as wage labour. We reiterate the anti-moralist slogan "Never Work" and hold that this formulation embraces the refusal of creativity.

5 Pleasure is a method for the ordering of experience into a hierarchy of desirability. It is an abstraction that negates the lived moment and requires reference to the possibility of past/future (or at least other) experience. We must reject all such systems of value.

6 Imagination is an abstraction that negates concrete experience. It is the central mechanism for the dominance of the image as chief agent of repression in our spectacular society.

7 Desire is the permanent deferral of the actuality of the present in favour of the purported gratifications of an illusory future.
8 We engage an active nihilism for the destruction of this world and all its abstractions:

No more leaders. No more experts. No more politicos. No more thinking 'culture' can change anything except a few bank accounts. The show is over. The audience start to leave. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around. No more coats! No more homes!

ABOLISH PLEASURE. REFUSE CREATIVITY. SMASH THE IMAGINATION. DESIRE IN RUINS. THE PRESENT IS ABSOLUTE. EVERYTHING NOW!

Desire In Ruins exhibition