RE:ACTION #3 WINTER 1995
Neither Crowley nor Guenon!
ALCHEMICAL INSURRECTION! PSYCHEDELIC BORDIGISM AND THE MYSTICAL BODY OF CHRIST THE KING
Since, whenever we are beautiful, it is by being possessed of ourselves, and we are ugly when we change over to another nature. And knowing ourselves we are beautiful, and ugly when we do not know ourselves. PLOTINUS.
It is one characteristic of the study of true occult science, that it may be explained to all men like the parables, so dear to the ancients, it appears to many only the expression of the flight of a bold imagination; we need, therefore, never be afraid of speaking too openly, the Word will reach only those who should be touched by it. PAPUS
If one wishes to penetrate to the deepest level of reality, one can say in all objective truth that 'the end of the world' is never and can never be anything but the end of an illusion. RENE GUENON.
From my personal experience with various ideologists of a Hegelian or Marxist type, I have the impression that a good number of men of considerable intellectual energy who otherwise would be Marxists prefer to be Hegelians because Hegel is so much more complicated. ERICH VOEGELIN.
An epoch without ugliness is an epoch without progress. ASGER JORN.
St. Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians asserts that men are endowed by God with a variety of gifts and using the metaphor of the human body, remarks how foolish it would be if one part of the body quarrelled with another part or tried to opt out of its membership. St. Paul insists that this is not merely an analogy but that human society is actually the body of Christ.
Clearly, this notion is not unrelated to the doctrine of organic centralism promulgated by the Italian left-communist Amadeo Bordiga. According to Bordiga, who opposed the united front tactics of the Communist International, the Party should consist solely of theoretically coherent militants. After the accomplished fact of a workers' revolution, the Party was to become the organ of central administration to human society - fulfilling a function similar to that of the brain in the human body.
Rather than being an observation of any merit, the preceding paragraph is merely a parody of the rhetorical technique employed by Karl Popper in his tedious tirade The Poverty Of Historicism. This positivist hack is notorious for his literalism, he apparently believed that the purpose of historicism was to predict the future, when anyone who understands Marxist methodology can see that those propagandists who analysed cycles of history and then projected these into the future, were attempting to influence the development of the societies in which they lived through the use of psychological techniques, and suffered very few illusions about the pseudo-scientific status of the discipline they pretended to practice.
While focusing his attacks on similar targets to Popper, in the work Science, Politics And Gnosticism, the Christian conservative Erich Voegelin deals at length with what he describes as the 'Gnostic speculation' of Hegel. Through the revival of the immanentism present in Gnostic theology and by identifying divinity entirely with human consciousness, Hegel prepared the way for Marx, Nietzsche, and every other modern theorist of merit. The Gnostics replaced a transcendent Deity with the power of illuminated human mind. Hegel, in reanimating this myth under the guise of philosophy, encouraged those who followed in his wake to 'come before Christ and murder love.' While the reactionary Voegelin denounced Hegel's Phenomenology Of Mind as a sorcerer's handbook, those radicals who have adopted Hegel's method while simultaneously abandoning his system, are more than happy to utilise this work as a grimoire.
However, while admiring the restless movement of the Hegelian dialectic, we remain critical of Hegel's conceptual reliance on the Enneads of Plotinus and works by Proclus of Athens such as Institutio Theologica and In Platonis Theologiam. As Voegelin notes, there are parallels between the Phenomenology and the movement of the Neo-Platonic soul from primordial rest, through alienation and the state of otherness, back through the world towards the soul's alleged source in the so called unity of the divine being. Rather than seeking a return to unity, a longing that informs the work of every scumbag traditionalist from Papus and Guenon to Julius Evola and Hakim Bey, the Neoist Alliance seeks a higher level of social disintegration. Naturally, this entails the dissolution of those cultural forms that structure this society. Aside from ongoing and unrelenting attacks upon the discourse of philosophy, two of our most immediate targets are those twin phantoms known as the avant-garde and the occult.
While occultists spend a great deal of time faking the antiquity of the activities in which they are engaged, the avant-garde's insistence on the element of innovation within its creations leads to a spurious denial of its historic roots. In this sense, the avant-garde and the occult are two sides of the same coin, they are the positive and negative poles which generate that multifarious enigma known as contemporary society. Since the avant-garde makes itself visible through manifestos, it must be banished. Correspondingly, the occult as a collection of hidden doctrines, must be realised (i.e. manifested) if it is to be simultaneously suppressed. The false Hegelianisation of Dada and Surrealism by the Situationist International has long obscured the necessity of this procedure. Since the avant-garde is undesirable, we will vanquish it by uniting it with its polar opposite. By bringing together the avant-garde and the occult (in its Celtic-Druidic form) under the rubric of the avant-bard, the Neoist Alliance is dissolving both these phenomena, and simultaneously destroying the false community engendered by capitalist social relations, a 'social' form predicated on the spectacular opposition of these twin modes of occultural invocation.
Since the Neoist Alliance takes the rhetoric of its opponents and re-orders this verbiage as a means of dissolving ideology, it inevitably follows that certain passive bores believe us to be involved in occult. Nothing could be further from the truth since, as we have already pointed out, to realise the occult is to abolish it. Nevertheless, among those imbeciles who have yet to scale the heights of theoretical incoherence and thereby abandon the illusion of a fixed identity, our activities must remain the night in which all cows are black. Pro-situ hacks and other bourgeois scum are incapable of grasping the passage we are forging between theory and practice. This is not something that can be fixed forever, but a flow travelling in a very specific direction. Naturally enough, it follows from this that we will not repeat Henry Flynt's error of spending thirty years attempting to frame the 'insight' that 'all beliefs are false' in a manner which is not self-refuting. For us, BELIEF IS THE ENEMY!
AN OCCULTURAL PUTSCH!
The wisest of the Ancients considered what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. William Blake.
Everything that used to be is wrong, because it used to be. Everything that has not been is right, because it has not been! It will be! Quality has been! We're going to do away with it! Quantity has never ruled! It shall rule! We Will it! F. T. Marinetti The Untameables.
In Marinetti's time it would have made no sense to talk of an underground and an avant-garde, although Futurism undoubtedly had its fellow travellers. The weak avant-gardism of Fluxus, which merged into the hippie underground of the late sixties, was without doubt 'the reign of quantity' (I invoke Rene Guenon merely so that I can banish this miserable spook, he was called up by Evola, Breton and Vaneigem; personally, I have no desire to return to 'tradition'). Within Situationist discourse, Vaneigem represents quantity while Debord symbolises quality, although obviously this is relative and the author of Basic Banalities and The Revolution Of Everyday Life appears in a very different aspect when his works are compared to those of George Brecht or La Monte Young. At least Vaneigem included chapters on space and time in his major work, whereas all Fluxus had to offer was an 'isness' of being that Brecht and others mixed up with some beat platitudes and 'a touch of Zen'. A reductionist might claim that the avant-garde favoured space against time, but even if this were true, it still necessitates an engagement with the issues raised by these constructs. Debord devoted two chapters of Society Of The Spectacle to the issue of time, and these are followed by fifteen theses on space collected together under the heading The Organisation Of Territory. Debord is quality at war with the quantity of Fluxus.
Time is both cyclical and linear; each generation born into the variegated cultures of this world must repeat the process of learning undergone by its predecessors, but at a faster rate than those who preceded them, so that they may add to the sum of knowledge they've inherited. It is by this mechanism that the process of generalised technological and scientific progress is pushed forward. The point being made here is that the time experienced by wo/man as an 'individual' social being is cyclical, while that which marks the evolution of societies and civilisations is linear. It has been a cliche since the 'time' of Herder that the notion of progress is relative. Wo/men are not necessarily happier today than they were a hundred (or indeed a thousand) years ago. It is equally banal to state that the average individual is uniquely suited to live in the particular society into which they've been socialised. There is no absolute standard, no scientific 'metaphysics of morals', against which we can measure the concept of progress. However, this does not mean that the idea of progress is doomed to remain empty, abstract or one-sided.
The Neoist Alliance utilises a 'myth of progress' which functions in a manner analogous to Georges Sorel's conception of the 'General Strike'. We do not believe in 'absolute' progress. Progress is simply a means of organising the present, it is a 'heuristic' device. The avant-bard insists that the only tradition by which anything can be judged is one that does not yet exist. In other words, everything must be reconsidered from the standpoint of the strategies the Neoist Alliance pursues as it ceaselessly reforges the passage between theory and practice. Thus, while the 'counter-culture' of the sixties reworked many of the fallacies propagated by the classical avant-garde, it did so under completely changed circumstances. In the new 'bohemia,' the hipster, the beat and the hippie imagined that it was possible to integrate 'art' and 'life' by treating one's life-style as an art work. This process of decomposition was accelerated by the advent of phenomena such as the Yippies and their heirs in the so called 'marginal milieu.' As a consequence, various buffoons have championed a one-dimensional notion of utopianism, while pointedly ignoring the 'fullness' of Sorelian myth.
While the element of fakery within the classical avant-garde is well known, with the passing of 'time' movements such as Surrealism and Dadaism have been shamefully enshrined within the received canon of 'modern' art. In The Popular Culture Of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, And Avant-Gardism by Jeffrey Weiss (Yale University Press, New Haven and London 1994), several sham schools of art are documented and the author states that it is difficult to differentiate these from 'the real thing.' In opposing the institution of art, the avant-bard should consciously aim to create a situation in which it is pointless to make a distinction of this type. This is merely one of the ways in which it is possible to step outside the discursive limits of art, religion and philosophy. Rather than attempting to 'resolve' contradictions, the avant-bard puts them to 'work' as the engine of an as yet unknown 'disorder.'
This page reproduces the main articles from the third Neoist Alliance newsletter, to see the other texts it contained view the pdf when it becomes available on this website (or consult the original document at an archive such as The British Library or National Art Library in London).
Re:Action 3 pdf (not available)
Re:Action 2 html
Re:Action 4 html
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Occulture |
Re:Action 3, Winter 1995.
Royal Watch: The Era of World Ruin
The cold war between the House of Windsor and the Vatican is heating up with the media reporting that the Princess of Wales has been flirting with Catholicism. Investigations by the Neoist Alliance have revealed that Diana was recruited by the Jesuits prior to her marriage. The calamities presently befalling the royal family are part of a sting operation whose origins date back in time to the British backed assassination of JFK in the 1963 Dallas 'turkey shoot'. The Vatican had hoped that installing a Catholic president would be the first step towards re-establishing the Holy Roman Empire with Washington becoming the third and final Rome.
Using their lackeys in the American Council On Foreign Relations, the Windsors systematically smashed the Papacy's power base in North America during the sixties. The Vatican retaliated by rearming its IRA foot soldiers and instructing them to wage war against the British in Northern Ireland. However, what they really wanted was control of the British mainland. To this end, the Jesuits recruited moles among the English upper classes. Clearly, Diana and Fergie were among the most important of these secret converts but it's impossible to evaluate the extent of Papal penetration into the British establishment until we know the identity of the mysterious 'third babe'.
Clearly, most 'Protestant' commentators have failed to grasp the significance of the possible shattering of the Act of Settlement of 1701 which banned Catholic monarchs from occupying the British throne and their heirs from marrying Papists. Writing in the London Review of Books (19 August 1993), Linda Colley asks 'how are loyal Protestant subjects of Northern Ireland going to react to a Catholic King Billy?' Talk of this type is highly misleading because if Diana smashes the Act of Settlement by bringing her children up as Catholics, it means the end of the British state.
There is little likelihood of the British being ruled by a single Catholic King. If the bar on Catholic monarchs is lifted, Prince Albrecht of Bavaria is first in line for the English throne, while William will get to rule the Welsh. Contenders too numerous to mention have long been vying for the principalities of Scotland, Kernow, Mannin and Ulster. For the time being, the Jesuit plot to destroy the Neo-British Empire looks more likely to succeed than the crumbling Maastrict programme being pushed by the Hanseatic League. If the Jesuit plan reaches fruition, Diana will be crowned Queen of Bohemia as a reward for her loyalty to the Papal cause.
Ultimately, the Vatican aims to dominate Europe using Prague as the centre of its operations. Rather unsurprisingly, it's the Hapsburgs who'd front a revived Holy Roman Empire. Rumours circulating among Protestant insiders suggest that the monarchy is planning to hit back by revealing its adherence to various Pagan cults. While the English press spent much of the early eighties 'deriding' the belief Prince Charles expressed in reincarnation, it never went as far as speculating on who the future king believed himself to have been in previous lives.
Charlie has extremely vivid memories of having been incarnated as a world leader who died just a few years before he was born. Yes, our would-be ruler believes that in a previous life he was Adolf Hitler! Charles also claims to have 'come back' as both Genghis Khan and Akhmaton (the Egyptian king who instituted monotheistic worship of the sun). The Windsors want to abandon the concept of a royal bloodline and instead foist a series of charismatic dictators on their 'subjects'. They're hoping the public will endure their ongoing misrule if it can be persuaded that this change of tack is actually a return to traditional Saxon conceptions of monarchy!
The City of London is less than happy with Charlie's planned counter-attack against the Vatican. As a consequence, representatives of the Mercers and Drapers Guilds have been conducting secret negotiations with the Hanseatic League. These meetings have shocked all those familiar with the deeds of the Gresham family who set up the stock exchange and are known to posterity as 'the hammer of the Hansa'. However, City leaders see rapprochement with the Hanseatic League as the only means of preserving Europe's Sufi-cum-Protestant traditions. As far as the Guilds are concerned, a line has to be drawn between them and Catholic idolatry. Now that the monarchy has been infiltrated by the Jesuits, it looks as if London is about to disown the corrupt political apparatus centred on Westminster. It has long been accepted that the 'head' of the British state is required to surrender their sword when entering Fleet Street from the Strand. It may not be long before the Corporation of London demands that the rest of the population produces a passport when travelling in and out of the 'Square Mile'. You have been warned!
First published in Underground 3 Autumn 1993.
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