Letters

A Lovely Curiousity, Raymond Roussel
William Clark

Asian Alternative Space
Andrew Lam

Gareth Williams
Ed Baxter

Dodgy Analogy
John Barker

Bloody Hell
An American Nurse

Tales of the Great Unwashed
Ian Brotherhood

Muslims and the West after September 11
Pervez Hoodbhoy

Desire & a kind of Playfulness
Copenhagen Free University, Exchange

Artists Initiatives in Moscow
Gillian McIver

Collective Cultural Action
Critical Art Ensemble

Zine & Comic reviews
Mark Pawson

The march
The story of the historic Scottish hunger march
Harry McShane
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Letters
...or how the SAC spends your taxes

Dear Sir and Madam,

We act for the Scottish Arts Council.
Our client has sought our legal advice in relation to correspondence which has passed between your company and our client following the decision of the appeals panel of the Scottish Arts Council not to uphold your company's appeal against refusal of an application for a grant from the Scottish Arts Council.
On our client's behalf, we write to inform you that many of the remarks contained in your e-mail of 14 January 2002 which was circulated to a third party are defamatory both of the Scottish Arts Council and of its officer, Sue Pirnie.
On behalf of the Scottish Arts Council, we reserve all legal rights available to it to take legal action against your company arising out of this defamation. We also on behalf of the Council request that you desist from making further such defamatory remarks to third parties.
The Scottish Arts Council has a duty to draw the attention of Sue Pirnie to your e-mail. She may well seek legal advice for herself in relation to the remarks which you have made about her.
We would point out that our client has a public duty to make decisions concerning the allocation of limited financial resources for the promotion of the arts in Scotland. The Scottish Arts Council, through its committees, seeks to exercise this function at all times in a fair and objective manner and its policy is that all applications be considered with reference to one criterion only: artistic merit.[emphasis added]
The Council has also put in place an appeals system for applicants whose initial application has been unsuccessful. Again the Scottish Arts Council seeks ensure that these appeals be conducted in a fair and objective manner. Such is our client's concern to maintain this that the procedures which are employed are kept under constant review.
Although your e-mail of 14 January contains defamatory remarks both of the Scottish Arts Council and of Sue Pirnie, it occurs to our client that the overall tone of the e-mail and the reckless and extreme language used in it reflect badly on your own organisation, undermining its professionalism and damaging its reputation. Our clients wonder whether the board of your company is aware of the contents of your e-mail and approves of them. We have also been informed that an e-mail was received by one of our client's officers from you Mr Clark on 29 January which started with the phrase "I won't go into the utter loathing and disgust that I feel in writing to you nor dwell on certain failings, lies etc". Our client cannot see how you can consider it to be in the best interests of your company to use such offensive language. It is totally unacceptable to the Scottish Arts Council for you to write to one of its officers in these terms. We would also point out that this may well be legally actionable. If you persist, our client may have to consider blocking e-mails from you.
You have the assurance of our client that despite any adverse impression created by the tone and language of your e-mails and the defamatory and offensive remarks contained in them, all future applications for grants which your organisation may make to the Scottish Arts Council will always be considered fairly and impartially, with reference to one criterion only: artistic merit. [emphasis added]
In the meantime, please let us have your assurance that no re-occurrence of these recent defamations and offensive e-mails will take place.
This letter is written entirely without prejudice to and under reservation of our client's whole rights and pleas in law and may not be founded upon in any proceedings.
Faithfully
Burness

William 'Reckless & Extreme' Clark responds:

Yeah mine too...Anyone who has applied to the SAC knows that this letter twice makes the false assertion that the SAC make judgements on the sole basis of 'artistic merit'. Even the director of the SAC knows that's a lie, and this raises quite serious questions. What utter incompetent gave these false assurances to the SAC's solicitors? Why was a presumably respectable law firm led into putting this into writing and then encouraged to threaten Variant with legal action while we were trying to use the SAC's insane appeals process. What does this say for the SAC's regard for their own and their Solicitor's professional reputation?
When this lie is first made it is said to be the basis of SAC's fairness and objectivity in relation to ALL applications. This is an astonishing attempt to deceive everyone. One possibility is that the solicitors just assumed that's what an Arts Council does--but it is exactly because they have dispensed with this criterion that the SAC's role has become intrinsically hypocritical and counter-productive.
When the lie is repeated it is as the basis of the SAC's ability to give credible assurances: so it is clear proof that those running the SAC give false assurances; and we have this courtesy of their solicitors, who will no doubt be writing to them asking why they were misled.
There are several other basic factual inaccuracies in this letter. For example, the SAC did not allow us to actually have an appeal: they had a secret meeting and decided not to allow this. We then informed them that as a result(according to their procedure) we would contact the Scottish Parliamentary Ombudsman. We did, but we cannot really represent our case because the SAC refuse to provide us with minutes of a meeting which they (on orders from above) refused to let us record. The appeals procedure is presently being expensively recomplicated by another team of lawyers...one Scottish MSP described it as "worse than the police's".
Despite their threats we did continue to send emails and they have taken no action. These emails did not defame anyone but actually quoted members of the SAC's Visual Arts Committee and were sent to several hundred people: we desire openness, they do not. That was their whole problem: that we'd made this public.
How could one defame the SAC anyway, the solicitors don't explain. To use this and terms such as 'reckless' and 'extreme language' of criticism is to reveal a paranoid and secretive organisation unwilling to embrace any form of public accountability. Michael Russell MSP told us:
"I have now written to the SAC just saying that I am concerned by the lack of funding, the way the decision was reached and by the "arrogant and irresponsible" use of public money on threatening legal action, still less bringing it forward."
To our knowledge he received no reply.
We are still disgusted and expressed this to Gavin Wallace (SAC Literature) because we could not believe that he agreed with the SAC's 'report' on Variant 13 (which contained the work of James Kelman, Peter Kravitz and Harold Pinter and was universally praised) that:
"The consensus of feedback on the quality of Variant has been that it has been [sic]... that it has declined...The content is often very biased or inaccurate... we cannot agree that you meet your stated objectives as a broadly accessible magazine; the language, editorial stance and quality mitigate against this"
This report, little more than condemnation, was written by one person, Sue Pirnie before issue 13 had been distributed or anyone could have actually read it. When we asked about this we got this gibberish back:
"...the comments in it; whether on content, communication or any other points, 'summarise feedback from, and received by, SAC'. It would therefore be inaccurate of you to attribute the points to any specific issue or timeframe."
The report is a poisonous piece of writing by someone without the ability to make an informed assessment, to uphold Sue Pirnie's judgement of James Kelman's work is madness.
Wallace didn't actually turn up to the meeting which refused to fund us, but Pirnie did and was practically the only person there. We have letters from Wallace saying we were the 'precedent' for this fund and that we would be funded, but then were told we were nothing to do with it and we weren't funded because of 'the competition', which turned out to be non-existent. The minutes of the meeting inform us that they found the magazine 'unintelligible', yet they also deliberately ignored the outside opinion they sought because it was impartially in favour of us. 
For the SAC we will be 'self-sufficient' if we do not receive their funding, but when they withdrew it they informed other bodies that we were 'financially unviable': that was two issues ago. People who the SAC consulted have told us that their decisions are 'political,' but SAC lack the honesty to admit this.
As far as magazines go the SAC is failing wildly. Magazines have even had to hand back grants because they cannot conform to the ludicrous criteria imposed upon the money. They also fund magazines which don't exist. 
Issue 13 (which attracted comment from the Cabinet Office) exposed the think tank Demos as the government's hired stooges in concocting arts policy. They conceded that we had 'trashed' their work. It's hard to see all this as anything else than an attempt to bully and punish us for this. 

Leigh 'defamatory' French replies:

While the Scottish Arts Council may refute it and threaten those who publicly speak out with legal action, it's common knowledge amongst arts organisations (born of experience) that SAC Arts Officers have disproportionate and undue influence on its Committees.
At the level of project funding, Officers control much more than just communication between artists who apply and a committee which allegedly makes funding decisions. Changes to the decision making structure, with the removal of all but a few emblematic artists, have concentrated this imbalance--what was a chronic situation has been made all the worse. It's totally unacceptable that these tiny, little committees at a remove from the majority of artists and the diversity of contemporary practice are let to hold sway. Funding schemes supposedly established to provide something altogether different, to be run by different people to address other concerns, have ended up perpetuating entrenched departmental deficiencies, internal bias and conceit.
The concentration of a few individuals in positions of regional and national influence across Scotland, coupled with the centralisation of priorities for the arts, also means that decisions are ultimately carried through which can negatively influence other departments, funding bodies, and funding decisions.

Another common view is that SAC funding decisions and their relations to other organisations are inappropriately dominated by issues of 'personality'. In Scotland the Arts Council is failing to support or encourage genuine critical debate. Where there is a lack of diversity and mass of representation, stereotypes circulate as surrogates for genuine, informed exchanges. There's an issue of cultural diversity and of language here, of the assumptions of a managerial class laden with negative imagery of 'Others'.
(Variant has systematically had projected onto it a derogatory, animalistic stereotype--we are said to be reckless, deficient, deviant, unprofessional, extreme, out of control, unintelligible...) 
It's baneful that Arts Officers can go unchallenged in simply defining Culture in terms of their own image, their own tastes, and those who do not match this description are lesser. Clearly, on a basic level, broader and informed SAC representation is essential to counter this deficiency which permits abuses of power to occur, whether knowingly or not.
Fundamental to these 'obstacles' has been a structural shift from ethereal "qualitative" assessments, to a supposedly disinterested and technocratic evaluation of how well applications conform to Cultural Strategy priorities--themselves ill defined and open to individual interpretation, enforcement and abuse. In essence, bureaucrats and managers have supplanted what were once artistic positions within the arts. This is an insidious shift to a 'management' of the arts along unabashed political tram lines.
The new Director of the SAC was previously the Head of Finance--for all purposes, an accountant. The most the papers could say of his re-appointment (after the SAC's most expensive recruitment drive ever) was he's a 'keen amateur photographer.' Others noticed that the forced removal and subsequent replacement of the previous Director, Tessa Jackson, conveniently cleared the way for new Labour appointed Chairman, James Boyle to go unchallenged as SAC's Cultural pontiff.
The debates surrounding Tessa Jackson's sacking are shrouded in mystery as lawyers were brought in to silence any meaningful public revelations. As such the situation remains unresolved. So how accountable or representative can the SAC be when the arguments and power struggles that actually matter within decision making are not known--when they are actually hidden from public scrutiny? 
 

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A lovely Curiosity
Raymond Roussel (1877­1933)
William Clark

"A formidable poetic apparatus"
Marcel Proust
"Raymond Roussel belongs to the most important French literature of the beginning of the century"
Alain Robbe-Grillet
"Genius in its pure state"
Jean Cocteau
"Creator of authentic myths
Michel Leiris
"A great poet"
Marcel Duchamp
"The President of the Republic of Dreams"
Louis Aragon
"The greatest mesmerist of modern times"
André Breton
"The plays are among the strangest and most enchanting in modern literature"
John Ashbery
"My fame will outshine that of Victor Hugo or Napoleon"
Raymond Roussel

Victor who? Go into any book shop and they'll probably not have anything on or by Raymond Roussel. In 1957 the young Michel Foucault noticed some faded yellow books in José Corti's famous Parisian book store and tentatively asked the grand old man "who was Raymond Roussel?" Wearied by Foucault's ignorance, Corti looked at him with a "generous sort of pity" and feeling a sense of loss sighed: "But after all, Roussel..." What Corti told him and what he found in the pages he raced through mesmerised Foucault into paying for an expensive copy of 'La Vue' and (in two months) he wrote the darkly romantic 'Death and the Labyrinth' on Roussel's world. ¹
When it was translated into English an anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement remarked that the book 'seems addressed to an audience of cognoscenti, which must be exceedingly small in France and can hardly number more than two or three here.' However, Foucault's book was noticed by the new novelists in France, and Alain Robbe-Grillet saw the 'fascinating essay' as one of the signs of a growing interest in Roussel, albeit not widely spread beyond certain circles. Roussel's life and work are so unusual that for a long time some people believed him to be a fictional character. ²
A new biography 'Raymond Roussel' by Francois Caradec and translated by Ian Monk has recently been published by Atlas Press--who in a series of Anthologies have enthusiastically preserved Roussel. This comes fairly soon after Mark Ford's 'Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams', (Cornell University Press) embalmed him a bit earlier, and there is some difference of opinion and emphasis in the two works.
His objective of complete artificiality caused Roussel to state he drew none of his creations from real life. Caradec just wonders 'who he was trying to kid' and similarly does not take Roussel's final work, Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres, on face value--few serious commentators do. Colin Raff's review of Ford's book states Roussel "derived none of his striking creations from experience, wrote unimpeded by introspection or sentiment, unhampered by moral reflection or facile realism." For Raff there is nothing 'transcendental' in Roussel: "The author's creative procedures are the final revelation." ³
The generalisation inherent in that is challenged by Caradec who I think is closer to events. One might as well say that the artists creative intentions were the 'final revelation'. The writing can only be regarded as an experiment in this direction.
"I call them famous because they are appreciated by me and some of my friends" Baudelaire
Roussel is on the sharp point of a whole anti-tradition in French writing which influenced modern art and modernism at a very fundamental level. Socially he was not part of the leftist avant-garde tradition which grew out of the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, when the French state turned on its internal opposition in a besieged city. Fabulously wealthy, Roussel is more associated with the Aristocratic and the 'Dandy'.
For Baudelaire in "The Painter of Modern Life" (1859) the dandy was an integral aspect to the character of the modern artist: 
"Contrary to what a lot of thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are not more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind....It is, above all the burning desire to create a personal form of originality, within the external limits of social conventions... dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism, but a dandy can never be a vulgar man... Dandyism appears especially in those periods of transition when democracy has not yet become all-powerful, and when aristocracy is only partially weakened and discredited... Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy."

Which is a perfect description of Roussel: the language is also mirrored by Foucault:
"Things, words, vision and death, the sun and language make a unique form...Roussel in some way has defined its geometry."
Dandyism is also seen as a conscious and elaborate rejection of bourgeois life, accentuating difference in a society that was moving toward uniformization. ⁴ In some respects the Dandy had to conjure up a world of artistic credibility, integrity and high standards from which to react and upon which to perform. Knowing he would be forgotten Roussel planned his own mythology, part of which was to posthumously reveal a great secret behind his books.

Like the declining star
This was Roussel's unique compositional technique which generated a structure for the plots and images of his writing, in much the same way that meter and rhyme control the arrangement of words in a sonnet. This synethstesia between music and poetry and prose developed gradually. 
"The quotidian is notable by its absence from his work: this is not a literature with much appeal for anyone in search of a social conscience. But if one is magnetised by works of the imagination derived almost solely from linguistics, Roussel represents some kind of summation. How I Wrote Certain of My Books, the posthumously published testament in which Roussel delineates many--but by no means all--of his writing techniques, is, as they say, essential reading. As a vade mecum it doesn't necessarily make the books easier to penetrate, but it does provide some clue as to what lies beneath them (though no matter how knowledgeable these clues make us, as readers, feel, no amount of shouting "Open Sesame!" at the threshold of the books entices them to reveal all their secrets). The most obvious examples...can be found early in his career, before he learnt to cover his tracks...One finds this mixture of the "simple as ABC with the quintessential" (to quote Michel Leris' memorable definition) as either childish or brilliantly inventive. A Rousselian finds both attitudes acceptable." ⁵
The process is one of unforeseen creation due to phonic combinations and is based more on puns than rhymes:
"I chose two similar words. For example billiards and pilliards (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two found sentences, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second. Amplifying the process then, I sought new words reporting itself to the word billiards, always to take them in a different direction than that which was presented first of all, and that provided me each time a creation moreover. The process evolved/moved and I was led to take an unspecified sentence, of which I drew from the images by dislocating it, a little as if it had been a question of extracting some from the drawings of rebus." ⁶
In lavishly published volumes Roussel's technique develops strongly from La Vue (1903), Impressions d'Afrique (1909) and then Locus Solus (1914), here summed up by John Ashbery: ⁷
"A prominent scientist and inventor, Martial Canterel, has invited a group of colleagues to visit the park of his country estate, Locus Solus ("Solitary Place"). As the group tours the estate, Canterel shows them inventions of ever-increasing complexity and strangeness. Again, exposition is invariably followed by explanation, the cold hysteria of the former giving way to the innumerable ramifications of the latter. After an aerial pile driver which is constructing a mosaic of teeth and a huge glass diamond filled with water in which float a dancing girl, a hairless cat, and the preserved head of Danton, we come to the central and longest passage: a description of eight curious tableaux vivants taking place inside an enormous glass cage. We learn that the actors are actually dead people whom Canterel has revived with "resurrectine," a fluid of his invention which if injected into a fresh corpse causes it continually to act out the most important incident of its life."
Caradec's biography (revised in 97 from that published in 72 because of the new finds of Roussel's papers) establishes that in real life, Roussel on several occasions visited the astronomer and scientist Camille Flammarion and witnessed his peculiar experiments and observations of the outer planets, then still in the process of discovery. It would seem that Roussel's admiration for the Jules Verne-like scientist Flammarion, was combined in the character, 'Martial Canterel' with Roussel's own aspirations to be a scientist and explorer. Flammarion even proposed him (like a scene from a Jules Verne novel) to the French Astronomical Society. Bringing out the person more than the process, Caradec tempts us to read Roussel as a blending of Jules Verne's, Flammarion's and Pierre Loti's influence. ⁸
Ford too, had access to many of Roussel's manuscripts, including his early unfinished epic poems:
"In these he found literally thousands of pages of obsessive description and endless digressions from the main plots. Ford calls this prolixity "compulsive," and that's not overstating it: Act II of the 7000-line La Seine contains nearly 400 named characters, all spewing banal small talk. Ford's book demonstrates that Roussel developed his techniques as an attempt to somehow control his manic verbosity." ⁹
There's none of that in Caradec's book, which presents a much more studious and controlled Roussel. Opinions also seem to differ in Ford's assertion that:
"...none of this could persuade the bourgeois multitude (whose tastes he shared, and whose adulation he coveted) of Roussel's gloire. Only the contemporary avant-garde--the surrealists, whose work he professed not to understand--were enthusiastic..." ¹⁰
Nothing interesting ever persuades the Bourgeois multitude, but he confuses us here with that 'only' and the suggestion that Roussel had bourgeiois taste. Caradec (and Andrew Thompson in the Atlas Anthology) establish that Roussel was appreciated by a range of critics and several other influential writers and reviewers of his day: some of the earliest were Edmond Rostand (author of Cyrano de Bergerac), Andre Gide and his fellow Dandy, Robert de Montesquiou who said of Impressions d'Afrique in 1921:
"The second half of the work explains everything, not merely with satisfying logic, better than that, with a mathematical precision. The author says somewhere of one of his characters, "the sum of his orations presented a great unity." This judgement could be applied to his narratives. The maddest incoherencies of the preceding chapters are explained with a geometric exactitude and with such an equilibrium of corroborating evidence that it almost becomes monotonous. It seems they must represent the hoc erat in votis of this particular genre. It ends up giving these combinations, which are above all else eccentric and bizarre, a bourgeois appearance." ¹¹
Roussel wrote more to vainly immortalise himself than to please the 'Bourgeois multitude': wealth freed him from that nightmare. Caradec constantly questions the pure abstraction others claim for Roussel. With Locus Solus Roussel's 'evolved procedure' (as Robert de Montesquiou termed it) develops the word demoiselle (meaning 'young girl') to pun into 'pile driver' and 'dragonfly' and then grow into the ridiculous flying machine mentioned earlier. But demoiselle was also the name of an early balloon-assisted aeroplane owned by the aviator Santos-Dumont. These were the days when humans learned to fly and as obsessed with science as Roussel was, he couldn't help noticing such an event. John Ashberry suggests that just as the mechanical task of finding a rhyme sometimes inspires a poet to write a great line, Roussel's "rimes de faits" (rhymes for events) helped him to utilise his unconscious mind. 
As Roussel developed as a writer his procedure grew to an incredibly complex method:
"We find here, transposed onto the level of poetry, the technique of the stories with multiple interlocking episodes (tiroirs) so frequent in Roussel's work, but here the episodes appear in the sentences themselves, and not in the story, as though Roussel had decided to use these parentheses to speed the disintegration of language, in a way comparable to that in which Mallarmé used blanks to produce those 'prismatic subdivisions of the idea" ¹²

Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique 
His master work is perhaps Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique ¹³ which comprises of four long Cantos, each containing a single sentence which starts out as a simple poetic statement or description. Roussel uses a series of parentheses which run to a maximum of five brackets-within-brackets, occasionally a footnote refers to a further poem containing its own 'onion-like' sets of brackets. Everything is written in rhyming 'Alexandrines' (French heroic verse of six feet), which is extraordinary given the self-imposed constraints of Roussel's procedure.
The presence of parentheses within parentheses produces multiple trains of thought. Not all the parenthetical rings sit neatly within one another. Canto II, for example, dips in and out of the fourth parenthesis at irregular intervals, but the poem gradually focuses into a impressive simplicity, like music. Roussel himself was a musician and the structuring of these images and ideas resemble musical form more than conventional poetic form.
If you can't face actually reading it, Juan-Esteban Fassio, of the College de Pataphysique, has invented a machine to do it: a kind of card index on a revolving drum with a handle. As one critic notes Roussel managed to enable himself to read his own books as if he hadn't written them. In 1950 Michel Butor stated that:
"It is not the juxtaposition of words which explains the wealth of repetitions and of reproductive apparatus encountered in these texts. On the contrary, it is this obsession which makes us realise what an irresistible compulsion, and authentic and deep-seated instinct, led Roussel to choose these singular methods, and not any others, for writing these works." ¹⁴
One of the most remarkable peculiarities of Locus Solus and Impressions d'Afrique is that nearly all the scenes are described twice. First, we witness them as if they were a ceremony or a theatrical event; and then they are explained to us, by their history being recounted. This is particularly the case in Impressions; the author went to the trouble, after publication, of inserting a slip of green paper on which he suggested that "those readers not initiated in the art of Raymond Roussel are advised to begin this book at p. 212 and go on to p. 455, and then turn back to p. 1 and read to p. 211." ¹⁵

Speak, my darling
Although complex, Roussel's methodology is one for writing; not for reading, which is performed in the normal way:
"Lucius Egroizard, who was driven insane by the sight of drunken brigands trampling his infant daughter to death: Not only does Egroizard compulsively sculpt lightweight gold figurines that repeat the brigands' lethal jig in mid-air, but the very hairs on his nearly bald head periodically detach themselves to mimic the dance. Egroizard experiments with an array of strange objects, until he constructs a Goldbergian contraption that produces a sound identical to his daughter's voice "It's you, my Gillette. They haven't killed you. You're here next to me Speak, my darling." And between these broken phrases, the fragment of the word, which he constantly reproduced, returned again and again, like a response. Speaking in hushed tones, Canterel led us quietly away, so as to allow this salutary crisis to run its course in peace." ¹⁶
Roussel loved children's shows and the popular theatre, disdaining the 'theatre of ideas.' One American critic dismisses Roussel as composing simply "fractured...fairy tales energised with a Jules Verne-inspired reinterpretation of the physical universe"--yeah that old thing. The fact that a book may resemble children's stories does not necessarily imply it was childishly written: as Gulliver's Travels, Huckleberry Finn, Alice in Wonderland and most of Borges would suggest. Roussel was greatly interested in children's games and puzzles (as was Lewis Carroll).¹⁷
Michel Leris says, "Roussel here discovered one of the most ancient and widely used patterns of the human mind: the formation of myths starting from words. That is (as though he had decided to illustrate Max Müller's theory that myths were born out of a sort of 'disease of language'), transposition of what was at first a simple fact of language into a dramatic action." Else where he suggest that these childish devices led Roussel back to a common source of mythology or collective unconscious." 
But it was with Roussel's plays that the ideas of Impressions of Africa and Locus Solus came to life and caused chaos in French theatre. Yes--the bourgeois multitude was outraged.
'There is no one who has not caressed some ambitious dream.' Raymond Roussel
How did Roussel become so obscure? I hear no one ask. Literary and artistic success are often based on mass marketing masquerading as artistic achievement; media attention dictates 'literary establishment.' But Roussel paid for loads of it. Literary history has a political economy which we are taught to believe (and not participate) in... or could it just be that reading the work is like wandering on a complex system of invisible trampolines?
The Second World War erased just about everything in Paris and the post-war literary climate was dominated by Sartre and existentialism. But the late 50s saw the emergence of the Nouveau Roman (Alain Robbe-Grillet, et al.) and the Oulipo (Ouvoir de Litterature Potentielle--Workshop of Potential Literature founded in Paris in 1960 and including writers such as Georges Perec and Italo Calvino) a group of 'Rousselian' enthusiasts who extended his "generative device," where the reader is obscurely aware of some other ordering principle beneath the surface, as similar elements keep recurring in unpredictable patterns. Both Caradec and Ian Monk are members of the Oulipo. As the Atlas website puts it:
"Our aim as publishers has been to delineate a coherent "anti-tradition" whose roots reach back to Romanticism, an oppositional literary and artistic manifestation which, in its various guises, has maintained an obstinate presence within an inimical host: the literary establishment...We see no necessity to acknowledge any idea of "progress" in this tradition, although naturally enough, it manifests itself in new forms at different times and in different places...Likewise, we do not subscribe to the notion of the end of modernism, of the concept of an avant-garde, of "experimental" writing, call it what you will. The writing we are committed to publishing is modern, despite its being from the last hundred and fifty years..."
Roussel entrusted his literary fate to a small gang of Parisian Surrealists--as can be seen from Caradec's examination of his will--which he mis-regarded as his dedicated coterie. It is because of a few genuine admirers such as Michel Leris that his work has survived. It is a pity Apollinaire--who coined the term 'surréalisme' for his own play Les Mamelles de Tirésias, to designate an analogical way of representing reality beyond realism--did not write about him. But along with Marcel Duchamp he delightedly attended Roussel's plays and both were heavily influenced. 
Put on at Roussel's own vast expense, they enjoyed some vogue largely because of the vociferous reactions by the audience. Here, according to Foucault the Surrealists tried to 'orchestrate the character of Roussel' with contrived demonstrations. Andre Breton, Aragon, Picabia, Robert Desnos and Micheal Leris (all on complementary tickets and probably out of their heads) went to the premieres and provoked the stunned audience. This ended with the police being called to assist with something like a rugby scrum between the actors the audience and (as the ball) the Surrealists. The events are genuinely hysterical; it is a strange thought that we could have had a sound and film recording of the events: nothing remains...(?)
Antonin Artaud observed that the issue is to "rediscover the secret of an objective poetry based on the humour that theatre renounced, that it abandoned to Vaudeville, before cinema got hold of it." Someone said that Roussel put an audience through a worse theatre of cruelty than Artaud dreamed of. ¹⁸ It was cripplingly obvious the actors were in it for the money, but this made the theatre come to life and life all the more theatrical. After a sober description of the cast Caradec describes the first night of Impressions d' Afrique with "All hell broke loose". Descriptions of it would have to range from the Carry On films crossed with Terry Gilliam's animations...and that was just the stalls...but we should strip away these influences and imagine it watched by an audience barely acquainted with Chaplin...it was like nothing else.
A few critics worried that the plays were the new Ubu Roi or Calagari (sets were variously described as Dada, Cubist and Expressionist which slightly illustrates how close these 'styles' are and how Roussel could encompass them). When revues of Impressions d' Afrique appeared in the popular press Roussel felt that he had passed 'quite unnoticed'. This is not unsurprising because as a young man he dreamed of supreme glory:
"...What I wrote was surrounded by radiance, I closed the curtains, for I was afraid that the slightest gap might allow the luminous beams that were radiating from my pen to escape outside, I wanted to tear the screen away suddenly and illuminate the world. If I left these papers lying about, they would have sent rays of light as far as China and a bewildered crowd would have burst into the house..." ¹⁹
Roussel's extravagances are no worse than Hollywood producer's love letters to themselves in multi-million dollar crap. The Surrealists (yet to enter their political phase) did not fail to notice that he was a walking advertisement for the redistribution of wealth, and sponged off him, as did practically everyone in the art world he came into contact with. He had to pay the actors extra money to go on stage giving them pearls and rare gifts and simply more cash.

'A conspiracy of knavery' 
The focus on the method and the structure has engendered a move away from viewing Roussel in relation to his times. His very involvement with the disreputable world of theatre displaced his own position in the upper class and he seems (almost by chance) to express its social values parodically. One of the characters in Impressions d' Afrique devises a parody of the stock exchange and we can choose to see Roussel as the drop-out Dandy son of a stockbroker, mocking the stock market as the absurd basis of the stability of our society. Perhaps, but people simply felt that he was having them on, that his work was an elaborate practical joke, that they were somehow being swindled:
"Apollinaire knew he was collaborating in an elaborate and sly mystification called modern art. Manet's public provocations and Toulouse-Lautrec's cabaret posters had introduced the principle that the studio joke can carry all before it. What begins as parody and protest ends up as the dominant style [...] it is possible to claim that the art of the early twentieth century in France is based on an elaborate hoax--a dare, a conspiracy of knavery on the part of many artists--and to make the claim without dismissing that art as worthless. After Jarry and Apollinaire and Duchamp, we have had to deal with several generations of gifted impostors. They were also dedicated to art." ²⁰
Somehow the ambition of a rich man is disingenuous compared to that of the bourgeoisie theatre owners, newspaper critics or actors: because he can purchase their support. Roussel's theatrical ambitions clearly delineated that any aspect of the tightly controlled artistic society could be bought: and that notions of artistic integrity were illusory. That probably made people uneasy too. From this distance Roussel comes out of it all looking like a hybrid of an artist and patron and a paragon of charm, wit and elan, unconsciously exposing an art world blind to its venal aspects and confined within the boundaries of simplistic rules.
"The actors were selected with a view to attracting the public. Roussel was open handed and paid them what they wanted. When observing how hard it would be to make one of the lines work, which, despite its dullness, Roussel was particularly keen on keeping, Pierre Frondaie exclaimed in desperation ; " To make that work we'd need Sarah Bernhardt!" Roussel replied: "Do you think she would accept? How much would she want?" ²¹
Yet he seems to have been devastated by the reviews. Pierre Frondaie (who had been hired to adapt Locus Solus) had slipped in cutting jibes at the reviewers sitting there on the first night. Still devastated ten years later Roussel wrote that afterwards there followed a 'river of fountain pens' from the critics. Nevertheless, he had an almost clockwork confidence, an indefatigable ability to persevere, oblivious to the insanity of his plays:
"Thinking that the public's incomprehension perhaps derived from the fact that I had until then presented only adaptations of novels, I decided to write something specifically for the stage."
Even after the stockmarket collapse the third play was put on with slightly more modest resources, here we see Roussel 'composing his audience' as if it were part of the casting. Although it has something of the Ernie Wise about it, one expects him to sound like one of Michael Palin's characters: surely a film will one day be made of Roussel's life. One has been made of the Petomane--with Leonard Rossiter--and surely Roussel had just as much to say, albeit by a different procedure.
Writers have left he music of the plays largely untouched and it is still in the early stages of critical comprehension. Yet no one can deny that Roussel was proficient musically, having studied at the Paris Conservatoire. When things got completely out of hand with the plays he, on occasion, would dive down to the piano and rattle off a crowd pleaser. At one performance they performed the whole thing to one guy in the audience and then gave him his money back.
"Was it not from India that Raymond Roussel sent an electric heater to a friend who has asked for something rare as a souvenir?" Roger Vitrac (1928)
Roussel's extravagant squandering of his fabulous wealth (mostly on his writing) and his curious mental state are the subject of numerous anecdotes of self-indulgence and pretence. Practically no one bought the books. The first edition of Locus Solus was not sold out until 22 years later. To make them look like best-sellers he produced several impressions at a time, printing 'tenth impression' on the covers of brand-new publications. Roussel was the child of an overbearing mother: according to Ford after the death of his brother "Madame Roussel insisted that her surviving son should undergo a medical examination every day." On their last foreign holiday they went to Ceylon and Madame Roussel brought along a coffin, so as not to inconvenience the other travellers in case she passed away. Supposedly Roussel, through a detective agency, commissioned a commercial artist named Henri Zo to provide 59 illustrations for one of his last works. Roussel supplied Zo with simple verbal descriptions for each image and, without ever meeting the artist, accepted the results that emerged. Roussel also travelled around Europe in a giant plushly furnished motorised caravan: forty years ahead of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He displayed this in front of the Pope and Mussolini who were suitably impressed and it appeared in the equivalent of Hello magazine. But, and its a huge psychological but:
"Daily contact with reality which to him seemed strewn with pitfalls obliged Roussel to take a number of precautions. During a certain period of his life when he suffered anguish whenever he happened to be in a tunnel, and was anxious to know at all times where he was, he avoided travelling at night; the idea that the act of eating is harmful to one's "serenity" also led him, during one period, to fast for days on end, after which he would break his fast by going to Rumpelmeyer's and devouring a vast quantity of cakes (corresponding to his taste for childish foods: marshmallows, milk, bread pudding, racahout); certain places to which he was attached by particularly happy childhood memories were taboo for him: Aix-les-Bains, Luchon, Saint-Moritz...; also, afraid of being injured or causing injury in conversations, he used to say that in order to avoid all dangerous talk with people, he preceded by asking them questions." ²²
'Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.' 

Claude Levi-Strauss
Roussel's final How I Wrote certain of My Books (and the second part of Impressions d'Afrique and the explanatory narratives of Locus Solus) are central to Foucault because they are Roussel's attempt to mythologises his life and work: Foucault is also fascinated by Roussel's suicide, which he glamorises. (what else to do?)
"In a way Roussel's attitude is the reverse of Kafka's, but as difficult to interpret. Kafka had entrusted his manuscripts to Max Brod to be destroyed after his death--to Max Brod, who had said he would never destroy them. Around his death Roussel organised a simple explanatory essay which is made suspect by the text, his other books, and even the circumstances of his death." 
Roussel, in a tragic state of barbiturate dependency, with all his money gone, surrounded by empty pill bottles was found on a mattress at the threshold of his pretend mistress' adjoining bedroom. This for Foucault becomes a metaphor, a rebus-like suicide note: 
"Whatever is understandable in his language speaks to us from a threshold where access is inseparable from what constitutes its barrier..."
Roussel wanted to achieve an aesthetic control of imaginative standards and to create the tools for an operation dictated by their shape, to achieve the transformation of his being through writing. As Foucault puts it:
"The identity of words--the simple , fundamental fact of language, that there are fewer terms of designation than there are things to designate--is itself a two-sided experience: it reveals words as the unexpected meeting place of the most distant figures of reality. (It is distance abolished; at the point of contact, differences are brought together in a unique form: dual, ambiguous, Minotaur-like.)"
Foucault wrote his book (which gives an enigmatic insight into his later works) while working on the history of madness. But Roussel's 'madness' was not the initial concern: he was intrigued by an escape from the existentialist school and phenomenology coming from the left and the 'End of History' ideology (then all pervasive in France thanks to the CIA). Foucault was attracted by Roussel's literary perverseness. 
For Michel Butor (writing in 1950) all of Roussel's writing, like Proust's, is a search for lost time, but this recovery of childhood is in no sense a retrogressive movement; rather it is "a return into the future, for the event rediscovered changes its level and meaning." Cocteau (who met Roussel in what would now be termed a rehab clinic) called him 'the Proust of dreams,' in this sense Proust--thought of as the 'final elaboration of 20th century fiction' in taking the novel to extremes--is rivalled, yet Foucault offers this disclaimer:
"His was an extremely interesting experiment; it wasn't only a linguistic experiment, but an experiment with the nature of language, and it's more than the experimentation of someone obsessed. He truly created, or, in any case, broke through, embodies, and created a form of beauty, a lovely curiosity, which is in fact a literary work. But I wouldn't say that Roussel is comparable to Proust." ²³

notes
1. Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth Athlone Press 1987 p172.
2. C. O'Farrell Foucault: Historian or Philosopher? Macmillan London 1989.
3. http://www.nypress.com/14/19/books/books.cfm
4. Préciosite and Dandyism: Ages of Beauty by Iole Apicella. Moliere wrote the play Les Précieuses based on (and ridiculing) an earlier French form of dandyism termed 'Préciosite'.
5. Trevor Winkfield, Reading Raymond Roussel. 
6. Roussel Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres.
7. Introduction to Foucault's 'Death and the Labyrinth.'
8. Pierre Loti (pyer lôte´) is the pseudonym of Julien Viaud, 1850-1923, French novelist and navy officer. He achieved popularity with his impressionistic romances of adventure in exotic lands. Roussel's nickname was Ramuntcho possibly from the 1897 Loti story of French Basque peasant life. Both on p183 and p271 Caradec repeats minor details of Loti's wife. On Flammarion Caradec enigmatically states that: "There are also, perhaps, traces of the astronomer's scientific mysticism and parapsychic research still to be discovered in Roussel's writings, despite his materialistic scepticism." (p225).
9. Quoted from Raff.
10. ibid
11. Robert de Montesquiou (Raymond Roussel Life, Death and work, Atlas). Caradec maintains that Willy worked out his procedure in 1925. Reviewers also say that Ford's book gave the impression that Roussel viewed his Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique not as an innovation in structure, but as the ingenious equivalent of a "crossword puzzle," Caradec has an indignant sideswipe at this saying that crossword puzzles weren't known in France at the time.
12. Atlas Anthology, Ashbury quoting Leris.
13. Another connection does exist between the two titles, namely: impression a fric, that is to say "a publication at the author's own expense" and so: "a new publication at the author's own expense." 
14. Atlas Anthology.
15. Locus Solus is available in French at http://wwwusers.imaginet.fr/~werkh/roussel/
There are some similarities with Flann O'Brien's novels, Michel Leiris, writing in 1954 states that there is no Rousselian work in which the end and the beginning do not join each other. At times we seem transported to the world of De Selby. After pages setting out Roussel's fervent admiration and worship of Pierre Loti, Caradec states:
"But the strangest document is certainly the portrait of Loti in the uniform of the Academie franccaise which was found among Roussel's papers: on the photo, somebody has inked in two large ears, before crossing out the face...the intention could be either mocking or malevolent, but we do not know who disfigured the photo, or why Raymond Roussel kept it." p183.
16. Ford's translation.
17. Doug Nufer http://www.litline.org/ABR/Issues/Volume22/Issue6/abr226.html
18. Andre Breton Anthology of Black Humour. Roussel's writing doesn't quite concur with Breton's ideas of 'pure psychic automatonism', which permitted no revision. Neither does it directly concur with his later obsession with the occult. Breton seems surprised by Roussel's eventual revelation of what lay beneath his work, writing in 1933: "...during his lifetime few people had clearly sensed that he owed his prodigious gift of invention to a technique he had himself discovered, that he was making use, as it were, of a crib for the imagination, like a crib for memory."
On the inspiration of occult writing techniques on the early symbolists, such as texts with keys and hidden meanings, ciphers and encryption see http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/poseur3.html
19. Roussel Comment j'ai écrit certains de mes livres.
20. Apollinaire on Art ed. Leroy C. Breunig, from the forward by Roger Shattuck. There was a recent presentation in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum of Roussel's writing and artwork influenced by him. Apollinaire, Duchamp and Picabia were impressed by the stage adaptation of Impressions d'Afrique which was partly responsible for Duchamp's ready-mades and directly inspired his enigmatic masterpiece The Large Glass (begun around about 1913). Picabia later incorporated his impressions of Roussel's plays into a collection of poems entitled Fille née sans Mère, copiously illustrated with schematic drawings of machines. Roussel's meticulous style with its abundance of puns and double meanings also influenced Salvador Dali's well-known landscape-cum-self-portrait named after Impressions d'Afrique. One can find slight similarities to Roussel in some of the more obscure written works (exploring the nature of language) by Duchamp, particularly 'The' (1915) (p639 The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, Arturo Swartz).
21. Caradec.
22. Michel Leris 1954, Caradec follows that quote a little bit too closely.
23. Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, from the interview by Charles Ruas. 
 

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Asian alternative space--World alternative city
Andrew Lam

Introduction
The essay aims at mapping out the field for artist run spaces and their relevance to the construction of Asia and Asian identities.

Asia's New Order
Alternative or independent art spaces are generally considered as the third tier within the institutional hierarchy, yet tend to question the conventional order and assume a more provocative position. 'Festival of Vision: Berlin--Hong Kong (2000)', is one event that exemplifies how an alternative organisation such as Zuni Icosahedrons (Hong Kong) could engage in a dialogue of cross-cultural politics. During 2001, 'alternative art spaces' became a key topic for the international symposia organized by Bamboo Curtain Studio (Taipei), 1aspace, Para/Site Art Space (Hong Kong), and the touring performances in Asia curated by Museum of Site (Hong Kong). 
Official patronage systems or local governments subsidies of all the above activities (with the so-called arms-length policy) has further complicated the current power relationship between artists, governments, and non-governmental organizations. ¹

Symbiosis
At the Gwangju Biennale 2002, the parasitical relationships between the alternative spaces and the museum system are satirical. Such simulacra of cultural politics reflect the complexity and irony in post-modernism, in particular the concerns with the reality, fabrication, and creativity in the process of historical archiving.
In theory and practice, an art system is constituted by a conglomerate of alternative spaces, studios, libraries, art villages, art colleges, museums and galleries, etc.. Pathological diagnosis of civic and urban issues, as driven by alternative spaces in the case of Old Ladies House (Macau), Fringe Club, Zuni, MOST, 1aspace (Hong Kong), Whashang Art District (Taipei), helps sharpen our vision and justifies necessary courses of action. We can picture this as 'stitching a button on a cloth, but not making a new skirt'. It is impossible for one part either to completely displace or replace the others in the art system.

They are here for now
With a visionary perspective, alternative spaces bring information, enjoyment and delights to the city. They justify the production of visual art projects from around the world. There is now an urgency for alternative spaces to reflect on their existences and political agencies relative of their local community. For example, 'Be Part of Our Vision', says Plastique Kinetic Worms (Singapore). When such positive attitude becomes alive, alternative spaces are here for now. Being part of a community fabric, Alternative spaces gear to particular problems. Alternative spaces like Bamboo Curtain Studio (Taipei), MOST (Hong Kong) deliberately work with different communities. Whashang Art District (Taipei) and Cattle Depot Art Village (Hong Kong) are the fruitful outcomes of long-term political negotiations. Loop, Insa Art Space (Seoul), Zuni Cattle College, 1aspace, Para/Site Artspace (Hong Kong), Sly Art or Shin Leh Yuan, Front, ITPark (Taipei), Dog Pig Art Cafe (Kaoshung), DDM Warehouse (Shanghai), LOFT (Beijing) and Surrounded by Water (Manila) are spaces devoted to young and emerging artists. Both Cemeti Art House (Yogyakarta) and Old Ladies House (Macau) dedicate themselves to woman artists. Amongst these spaces, their responses are contingent to cultural conditions of the city that take precedence over art traditions and community history. They are here for now! ²

The New Asia
Cultural commentators and critics are now taking the 'Asian ensembles' into a new conceptual ground. The philosophy behind the new 'Asian' aesthetics is neither a Venetian nor a Rococo Revival. Instead of dressing itself up as a nostalgic kitsch, it is deeply seated in the city's dynamicism. The Sai Yeung Choi Street South (Hong Kong), Art-Gu, Dongdaemun-Gu (Seoul), Dong Mun (Shenzhen), Lan Kwei Fong (Macau), Sin Tian Di (Shanghai), San Li Tun (Beijing), Si Mun Ding (the area near West Gate, Taipei), Boat Quay, Robertson Quay, Clarke Quay (Singapore), the open area around Petronas Twin Towers (Kuala Lumpur) are new settlements for: shopping arcades, D-I-Y shops, cyber cafes, karaoke-bar cum discos, ethnic restaurants, teahouses and other places which have liberated the cities' physical barriers, unfolding options for all generations. The aesthetics of futuristic cities hinge on openness, fluidity, density, diversity, dialogue, noise, Do-it-yourself, etc. The 'creative industry', as an integral yet subordinate part of tourism, will be crucial for a sustainable development of the urban environment. This topic will be pertinent for discussions in the foreseeable future.
The concept of a novel city's Alternative spaces are the impetus for transforming cultural productions. The mobility and diversity of alternative spaces would likely displace the current establishments. As a consequence of de-colonization, Asian cities are met with unprecedented challenges under globalization. Operating as vanguards for alternative discourses, Asia's alternative spaces are still a local and community­based entity. It would be interesting to differentiate the conceptual visions and practices of alternative spaces and to compare them to various civic museums and galleries. The boomerang effect of Asia's alternative spaces would expose the speculation for an alternative model in Asia. Based on the novel city and developmental concept, it is the cultural differences that presuppose Asia's alternative nature.

Cultural difference and the Asian globe
In the face of homogenous 'one world culture', two issues confront Asia's cities. On one hand, these cities are neither analogous nor identical. The unresolved tensions between local heritage and communities further intensify cultural and social differences. On the other hand, Asian cities share common problems. Economically, the Asian financial crisis dating back to 1997 was widely felt in the region. The recent 9/11 tragedies further exacerbate the situation. The modernization and renovations of the city bring about cultural development, and subsequently a new space that accelerates acculturations and synchronizations. As colonialism draws to a close, Asian cities are now confronting an unprecedented identity crisis.
However, the development of Asian cities and satellite towns are multi-faceted. The Internet surfers are able to visit virtually the cultural facilities from around the world, undermining the real visit of museums and libraries, turning them as sites for 'amusement'. A new art system in Asia is emerging. Like a conglomerate into greater power and networking, dynamic art villages, districts and open cultural spaces, art and design shops, alternative galleries, city green houses, temporal warehouses, renovated industrial plants, multi-purpose workshops, teahouses, art cafes, 24 hours bookshops, leisure inns, TV art channels, on-line cyber war spaces, renting-out museums, electronic publications, artists' colonies on homepages, are now on the move. These phenomenons demonstrate the power to re-define the generic city. The distinctions between center and marginal, software and hardware, permanence and ephemerality, work and leisure are all beginning to break down. The synchronization of Asian cities thus opens up new spaces and dimensions for everything. ³
History does not seem to repeat itself under globalization, yet it narrates an incessant story in a local context. The model of appropriation always operates in line with modernization. The next beta version of 'World Alternative Cities' in Asia are 24 hour action-cities in 'non-stop' real time.
The overall characteristic of a new Asia is its pluralism and eclecticism. The creative power of alternative spaces is made adaptive to the marketing strategy of enterprises. In turn, the official art establishment is obliged to form new alliances with artists and alternative spaces. The top-down approach will be scrutinized, thereby transforming the overall planning, programming, and budgeting of cultural policy. By delegating power to the community, creative spaces and strategies will become a conduit for abandoned values and new orders to bridge. A new plateau of humanity is in the making.
The "local" affects the "global"
'Think Globally, Act Locally' is a worldwide strategy that can be applied everywhere on all levels. There is sample evidence that Asians, by acting locally, might affect the Eurocentric 'global'.
Hollywood as an icon for world culture has co-opted the 'alternative look' of Hong Kong cinema in its eclecticism.⁴ The acclaimed Tokyo and Hong Kong International Film Festivals are international attractions. After the reception of popular Japanese culture over the past twenty years, recent Korean TV drama brings new hype to Taipei, Hong Kong, and possibly the world. When it comes to enhancing informational capabilities, Korea is claimed to be at the forefront, having aggressively pursued development and rapid technological advancement. According to a recent article from The New York Times, the penetration of Korea's Internet services now stands at the highest level in the world and has become an essential part of contemporary culture. In 2001, China was recognized as the number one nation that has achieved the greatest economic leap forward. In a recent policy address by the Chief Executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, the goal of Hong Kong is to attain the identity of 'Asia's World City'. While on the other shore of South China Sea, executive Yuan from the Taipei Cultural Council pursues his city as the 'Asian Media Center' at the time when there are very few alternative spaces devoted specifically to new media arts as in the case of LOFT (Beijing) or Videotage, Video Power (Hong Kong). With little exception, Singapore's Ministry of Information and the Arts proclaims itself as 'A Hub City of The World', sidelining the issues of censorship towards artist-run spaces like Substation, PKW, or Singapore Art Museum. No matter whether these empty labels for Asian cities are valid or not, if Asian alternative spaces form a united front, the art world order might be turned over in one night!
Stemming from the 80's to the 90's, artists in alternative spaces have been seeking their own identities through rediscovering their heritage and community. They realize the importance of belonging by regaining interests in an abandoned place. 
As the system and infrastructure takes shape together with adequate institutional and private support in place, alternative spaces in Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, and Singapore would consolidate their influences. 
Modernism: a failure to commitment and post-modern Asian aesthetics
In contrast to small alternative art spaces, the developed Asian system is a mere 'Big White Elephant' that perpetuates Modernism into the corners of Asia. A Modernism, committed to resolve social and technological problems, fails to meet the mass expectation and places efficiency over social and other values. Can alternative spaces still play a productive role in a post-modern age?
The exteriority of Asia's alternative spaces is too often reflective of the changes of the city: exotic pluralism and hybridity, in order to accommodate its alternativeness in an establishment. The theme of 'Pause' would undoubtedly play an active role in continuing the role of the Gwangju Biennale to 'legitimate the underground' into a larger system. The situation resembles P.S.1.'s affiliation with MoMA in New York City.
Reappearing City
Asian cities are evolving to become a diverse and complex cultural field at the expense of local heritage and cultural identity. Ackbar Abbas's discourse on 'disappearance' is undoubtedly a common experience celebrated among alternative spaces in Asia. The Workshop (Hong Kong), Quart Society (Hong Kong), SOCA (Taipei), Long Tail Elephant (Guangzhou), Surrounded by Water (SBW; Manila), Art Village (Singapore), Studio Shokudo, Sagacho Exhibit Space, P3 art + environment (Tokyo), came to a closure with the erasure of many forgotten histories. However, Asia is rich in its potential for the re-appearances of 'past' and 'new' histories. ⁵
How independent are independent art spaces?
This is a key question. Can they still be a critical supplement for the establishment of a city? How can they be instrumental in the development of art and culture? How can they question our amnesia towards modernity outside of the museum and gallery system? An assessment of the mission statement of Asia's alternative spaces may give us an answer in the reconfiguration of a new cultural landscape and the conceptual mapping of a new utopia. 
One rarely finds a social space outside of the commercial gallery and museum, as in the case of BASH (Beijing), where artists can find the guiding tenets for actions and sharing. Alternative spaces provides hope to the asceticism of the establishment, an opposition to the mal-administration, adverse conditions of exhibition venues and insufficient resources and facilies that they usually face. 
The new tactics for subverting the art system might be reflected on the art making. To one of these non-profit alternative spaces such as Sly Art or Shin Leh Yuan (Taipei), the sophistication in the production of artworks is not a primary concern. Their anti-object attitude as originated from oriental philosophy is apparent in the strategies of display and the daily operations of the venue.
The limitations imposed on Asia's alternative spaces not only reveal the negative sides of modernism and globalization, but the oppressed existence of alternative spaces also validates a pluralism that the open city should demonstrate. Life under the economic boom is supposed to be stable, cheerful, harmonious and substantial. However, alternative spaces portray a city as a negative spectacle that is subversive and futile. The complete contemporary urban city is now defined by its alternative otherness and rival competitiveness. For examples, the exhibition projects at Whashang Art District, curated by Huang Hai Ming, hosted at the same time as The Taipei International Biennale 2000, and the partnership at East Link, DDM Warehouse, BizArt (Shanghai) with The 2000 Shanghai Biennale demonstrated the dynamic and parallel functions of alternative spaces.

City transformation
As seen in the larger context of both regional and global perspectives, the structure of an art system changes relative to the changing ideology of its surroundings. When the time comes, the idea of alternative spaces would be consolidated and realized. No longer a minority or an underground force, the alternative spaces in Asia will boom with social recognition. A good example is the well-received video project Port co-organized by BizArt in a park of Shanghai during 2001. Alternative spaces in Asia are working with new sets of codes, ethics, and working models that will expose the problems and issues of the system. They will set examples to show how public institutions should become more receptive to the community. They can also identify issues pertaining to locality and open up spaces for contemplations. In marked contrast to Rem Koolhaas' description of Asia's 'Generic City', 'Alternative spaces' in Asia have thus far shifted the basis for identifying cultural differences. The campaign for governmental recognition and support by grass-roots organisations in Whashang Art Village, Singapore Art Village and Oil Street Art Village have demonstrated a visionary leadership for a different approach towards to cultural institutions.⁶

Geurilla war amongst alternative spaces
Some alternative spaces in Asia are merely extensions for government to fund activities for international recognition. While some alternative spaces are ornamental--just decorating the pub with some installations or video works--one would not expect any provocative work from these galleries.
Some alternative spaces are well designed and furnished with good ceilings, white walls and wooden paving. Even for an expert, it is hard to differentiate them from commercial galleries without paying attention to the differences in their programming. If alternative spaces were commercially viable, what differences would it make when comparing to commercial spaces?
For years, there has been a split of views in Taipei over the issue of Whashang Art District. The organising of two similar international symposia in the same month is evident of an acute competition between 1aspace (Cattle Depot Artist Village) and Para/Site Art Space. The future of Asia depends on the way different cities and their infrastructure compete.

New City Typology
Villages surrounding the city
Government facilitated art villages, e.g. Taipei Art Village (Taipei), International Art Village (Nantou) or Sanmien Artist Village (Guangzhou) are the most generic places that one can imagine. On the contrary, artist-run villages such as Artist Village (Taidong), Tam-awan (Baguio), Whashang Art District, Tongzhou Artists Community (Beijing), Singapore Art Village (Singapore), Kobe Art Village Centre (Kobe) as well as the former Oil Street Art Village (now Cattle Depot Artist Village), have generated a lot of energies in their respective communities, generating controversial discussions among the artists. The incentive for their gathering is not only to attain a stable studio space for long-term development, but also to compete for more exhibition opportunities and support. In comparison with the official art villages, they could gradually become institutionalised and be a part of the city's cultural hub. ⁷

Café bar cum showroom
Integration with commercial incentive is a survival strategy for all generations of alternative spaces in Asia. Current galleries such as Song Ha Gallery in Art Town (Pusan), Club 64, HOK7 (Hong Kong), big sky mind (Manila), Café Pulilan (Bulacan), Cup of Art Café Gallery (Bacolod), Blind Tiger Bar (Quezon) are primal examples for survival nowadays. The presence of bar and restaurant is a sign for entertainment culture. LOFT, Top Floor Gallery, Courtyard Gallery in China also take up commercial strategies to support their continued display of political art. The next generation of alternative space could be those cyber café-bar cum galleries, i.e. Risiris Internet Pub (Quezon), which also helps to generate more of the city's new opportunities. 

Abandoned warehouse for city regeneration
Modernisation and industrialisation has turned architecture into a commodity for consumption. This process inevitably displaces the original function of a building. Many abandoned warehouses, failing to comply with the city's aspirations and standards, have become a site for artists to conduct experimental projects. In Taiwan, renewed urban spaces, i.e. Whashang Art District and the Rail Storehouse Reused Scheme. The spaces taken by artists to re-model as new sites, such as Chiayi Rail Warehouse (Chaiyi) and Taichung 20 Warehouse (Taichung), are used for exhibitions and workshops. Also in Mainland China, places like BASH, CAAW (Beijing), DDM Warehouse and Eastlink (Shanghai) are old warehouses being scrutinized in terms of its politics and artistic activities. Regardless of their conservative operations and strategies, they, nevertheless, re-present the forgotten history and narration behind modernisation.

Extensionss of artist studios
Whenever an artist emerges, there will be an alternative space. Artists usually use their studio spaces for experimentation. They open their studios and hold public exhibitions to elicit inputs and insights. The past or current Third Space Arts Laboratory, Lupon Art+Design+Lifestyle (Quezon), Kwok Studio, Happening Group Studio in Shanghai Street Artspace, Desmond Kum Studio, James Wong Studio, Para/Site Artspace, Workshop (Hong Kong), SOCA, and the Bamboo Curtain Studio (Taipei) are well known examples for exhibition and workshops. Besides, there are artists like Carlos Celdrans and Er Dong-keung that employ their homes for public projects.

Embassy-affliated cultural centers and disguised spaces
There are some embassy-affiliated cultural centers such as The Goethe Institute, which play a great role in promoting contemporary art and international exchanges. After The 2000 Shanghai Biennale, many alternative spaces closed. BizArt, with a sound administrative back up, remains as the most active and popular in Southern China. It seems that the strategy to collaborate with embassy-affiliated institutions can protect the space from censorship and financial deficit. The Chang Mai Art Museum (Chang Mai) is itself a disguised alternative space, though it adopts the name of 'Museum'. It showcases students' experimental work from time to time. Strictly speaking, Galeri Petronas inside The Petronas Twin Towers (Kuala Lumpur) and Dimension Endowment Of Art (Taipei) are not alternative spaces. However, their devotion to education, research, publication and display of experimental art make them an alternative among other conventional alternative venues.⁸

Space networking
With the rise of alternative spaces in Asia, a new cultural geography is in formation. Asian cities are now being redefined by alternative spaces with new propositions. The new inter-regional networking is a worldwide strategy and is not exceptional to these alternative art spaces. The Asian counterparts are no longer working alone on the periphery of the cultural arena. In recent years, there is a trend to build up a network for mutual support and recognition in the hope of reshaping the global order. On one hand, the institutionalisation and commercialisation of Asia's alternative spaces could finally defeat some of their original missions as a counterforce to the establishment. Thus, some of the alternative spaces would become a newcomer of establishment or the Third Force? Alternative art spaces, in my view, can retain integrity by maintaining a smaller scale of operation and closer ties to a local community. They should be visionary, with a clear idea of what to do and what not to do.
 

Footnotes:
1. In early 2002, The Japan Foundation Asia Center published a small booklet Alternative: Contemporary Art Spaces In Asia, which sheds some light on selected independent art spaces and museums in Asia.
2. See also Eileen Legaspi-Ramirez, Alternative Spaces: We're Here for Now in Transit Vol. 1, 10-12. pp. 22-25.
3. See Art Papers Mar/Apr 2001 Sp. Issue on Conceptual Art.
4. The 49th Venice Biennale saw the erection of a larger-than-scale replica of the famous California landmark, Maurizio Cattelan's Hollywood in Palermo, Sicily, an official project outside Venice, witnessing the play and displacement of global influence. For photo, please refer to Art Forum, September 2001, p.168.
5. Please refer to Hong Kong and the Culture of Disappearance. An Interview with Ackbar Abbas by Geert Lovink in Kassel, Documenta X, July 19th, 1997 and Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong, Culture and Politics of Disappearance, University of Minnesote Press, Minnesote, 1997.
6. According to artist Koh Nguang How, the Singapore Art Village is still active without National Art Council's support of a permanent location.
7. Steven Pettifor, Northern Thailand's Artistic Home, Asian Art News, 2001 September-October, pp.62-65.
8. For more information, please refer to Xiaopin Lin's Bejing: Yin Xiuzhen's The Ruined City, in Third Text, 1999 Autumn, pp.45-54. 
 

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Gareth Williams
Ed Baxter

Gareth Williams, who has died of cancer aged 48, was a founder member of This Heat, a rock trio whose significance and musicality the historically minded listener would favourably compare to Cream or the Jimi Hendrix Experience, but whose recalcitrant experimentalism led them far away from mainstream success.
Williams was born in Cardiff in 1953. After taking his A-levels, he took up a job as a Drugs Rehabilitation Counsellor in Newfoundland. By the mid 1970s he was working in retail as the deputy manager of the Cranbourn Street, Westminster branch of HMV, a post he held with a madcap degree of irresponsibility. Once, to win a television set offered as an A&M sales promotion, he purchased for the shop hundreds of copies of Rick Wakeman's "The Six Wives of Henry VIII". On receipt of the tv, he returned the records as faulty, having himself scratched and made unsaleable the entire shipment. Williams was a fanatical listener and record collector and as such attracted the attention of guitarist Charles Bullen and drummer Charles Hayward. Hayward was rehearsing with Bill MacCormick, bass player with Matching Mole, the pair having been persuaded by an unexpected Top 30 hit to reform Quiet Sun, a band they had formed at school with Phil Manzanera, then guitarist of Roxy Music. Bullen handled the guitar parts and Williams was brought in to add a missing spark of vitality to the group, but his lack of musical training was anathema to Quiet Sun's formal brand of progressive rock. For Bullen and Hayward, however, Williams was a revelation, a maniacal performer whose intuitive approach was urgent and deeply liberating. There had been non-musicians working in rock before, notably Brian Eno in Roxy Music, but Williams was perhaps the first to take centre stage rather than being merely adding colour to familiar forms. The trio set about reinventing rock in a manner reliant on accident and deliberately devoid of technique. 
This Heat played its first concert on February 13 1976, mere days after it had formed. (As a sign of their confidence from the outset, they included "Rainforest," recorded at this gig, on their debut LP). In the early days noisy instrumental improvisations dominated; but This Heat were also adept at songs and gradually achieved a balance between the abstract and the formal. In concert, trance-like ambient soundscapes would typically fade into riotous, even danceable, anthems before giving way to a heady shower of glorious noise or leery episodes of half-stoned silence. This Heat attracted an audience of fervent admirers and enthusiastic critics, for whom Williams became "the musician's non-musician."
This Heat took to using tape recordings in concert, with Williams becoming adept at playing cassette machine as a solo instrument. For them tape was a legitimate element in its own right, a creative rather than recreative musical source which allowed them to bring into the mix sounds from another time and place. It provided This Heat with an other-worldliness which arose directly from their own lives and previous playing experiences and which lent the band a singular vibe of vertiginous alienation. They played at extremely loud volume, usually in pitch darkness. From the start, and with a kind of light-headed arrogance born of the unexpected discovery of something new, This Heat deliberately set themselves apart from other groups, an attitude that prefigured the punk explosion that followed and partially engulfed them a few months later--and which they in turn influenced as pub rock simplicity gave way to post-punk experimentation. They issued a spoof manifesto: "This Heat was made out of the collective desire of its members not to be in any other groups." They set up their own rehearsal and recording studio in Brixton, Cold Storage. Here they recorded their first album, "This Heat"(1979), taking over two years to assemble it. The maxi-single "Health and Efficiency," perhaps their finest single work, was released in 1980, a deliriously upbeat song "about the sunshine" which allowed Williams to display his now considerable skill as a musical bricoleur. This was followed by "Deceit" in 1981, an LP which put its finger on that fearful era's g-spot, decrying the nuclear arms race and media disinformation in a sequence of exquisitely executed but agonised songs. If it voiced a bitter anger at the world in general, "Deceit" perhaps also articulated the tensions within the band.
By the time it was released, Williams had quit the group. Having once declared that This Heat was the music the three of them made together, Bullen and Hayward nevertheless carried on, now joined by bass player Trefor Goronwy and keyboardist Ian Hill. The band's final concert took place in London on May 18 1982. By then Williams was in Kerala, south India, where he studied kathakali dance-drama. He converted to Hinduism, mainly to gain easier access to temples. On his return to London, Williams co-authored the first edition of "The Rough Guide to India" and took a Degree in Indian Religions and Music at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
In 1985 Williams with Mary Currie made "Flaming Tunes," a collection of raw yet plaintive songs, domestically recorded and released more or less surreptitiously in a hand-coloured cassette package. While This Heat was angrily engaged with social issues, "Flaming Tunes" found Williams in a calmer, introspective mood, singing suggestively autobiographical fragments: "My body moves forward. This restless mind runs back like a banner that flaps in the wind."
In the 1990s he played with Hayward in the short-lived avant-rock project, Mind The Gap, and was one of many players featured in Hayward's monthly "Accidents & Emergencies" improvisation series at the Albany Empire in Deptford. He was also active as a promoter as well as working occasionally as a DJ and pursuing his own musical projects, recording obsessively at home, notably with Maritn Harrison (one of This Heat's pool of engineers) and singer Viv Corringham. The advent of compact discs had led to a renewed interest in This Heat and the albums were re-released, along with the archival "Made Available: John Peel Sessions" and "Repeat". Williams was diagnosed with cancer in September 2001. Early in December 2001 the three members of This Heat got together once more and tentatively rehearsed with a view to a live performance or new recording. Before any resolution to their diverse musical or temperamental differences could be reached Williams died, on Christmas Eve. He is survived by his partner, Nick Goodall.

[Gareth John Williams, musician, born April 23 1953; died December 24 2001]
 

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Dodgy Analogy
John Barker

Cornelius Castoriades was a tough-minded activist and intellectual who, under pseudonyms like Chalieu and Pierre Cardan, wrote for the group Socialisme ou Barbarisme which--in the 50s and 60s--theorised and gave encouragement to revolutionary notions of workers' self-management, organisation from below. (See Interview in Variant 15 Volume 1). Like many others he withdrew from active politics in the changed circumstances, the defeat post-1974, but did not in any way 'sell out', even as a respected academic on the 'socio-philosophical circuit'.
In the late eighties what has variously been called Chaos, Complexity and Emergence theory had come to be a big player in 'social' as well as natural sciences. Initially it looks sympathetic, with its emphasis on organisation from the bottom up, but Castoriades had the bullshit-detector of tough-minded people and wrote in Done and to be Done (1989) "The hive or herd are not societies", this when the hive was such an important analogy for Complexity theory. As its populariser (and Wired magazine editor) Kevin Kelly puts it: "The marvel of 'hive mind' is that no one is in control, and yet an invisible hand governs, a hand that emerges from very dumb members." Castoriades' wariness of such stuff, he having been a populariser of notions of self-management, was clearly a threat to its ideologues. Thus at a conference of the Complexity Group at the LSE in June 1997, he was singled out to be patronised by one Gunther Truebner: "At a global level, the unpredictable dynamics of autopoiesis argues against the unrealistic view of those like Castoriades who believe that it is possible to move world society in a desired direction via deliberative global democratic process."
Castoriades' wariness comes from a mistrust of the use of natural science analogies in the world of human relations, analogies which seem always to have the same result and perhaps, who knows, the same aim, that of making ahistorical assumptions about human society. In the language of structuralism and post-structuralism, the signifier is not respected for what it is and so can be used in an ideological and often far-fetched manner to say something about the signified, or rather to shape the signified. Exactly the moment to be wary. 
I want to argue that analogies in either direction between the human world and that of natural sciences are a useless hindrance when used from a humanist progressive viewpoint; to be fought against when used to justify inequality and realpolitik; mocked when used as disappointment displacement by 'libertarian' theorists; and the ahistoricism in all three brought out into the open.

The Sokal affair
On the face of it, this theme, of dodgy analogies, is similar to the Sokal affair, in which the New York physicist in tandem with Jean Bricmont wrote a spoof article with the wonderful title Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, which was accepted and published by the prestigious cultural studies journal Social Text. In fact it is this aspect of the business, the misuse of analogy, which has disappeared in the furious argument that has simmered on. Sokal sounds like someone who is very pleased with himself, and the editors of Social Text like parody patricians of the left. No humble pie from them: when discovering that what they had published was a hoax they responded instead: "From the first , we considered Sokal's article to be a little hokey...His adventures in PostmodernLand were not really our cup of tea...Sokal's article would have been regarded as somewhat outdated if it had come from a humanist or social scientist."
The affair then, as a critical citizenry, is not our business, especially when one sees how much of an ego 'n budget turf war it is between comfortable academics, despite Social Text's attempt to garner our sympathy thus: "There is nothing we regret more than watching the left eat the left, surely one of the sorriest spectacles of the twentieth century." Its supporters make valid points about the undermining of objective peer reviews in scientific journals under pressure from corporate research financing and that in general science does not take place in a historical or cultural vacuum, which is in part shown up by the back and forth of misleading analogy. However the journal's leading defender, Stanley Fish, himself falls back on a dodgy analogy well-used by social reality philosophers, i.e. that baseball is socially constructed and is also real. All very well, but if it were decided tomorrow that baseball was pointless it would cease to be a social construct, but what of the physical world?
The claim of Fish and Social Text is presumably that examining the social constructs involved in science is in itself a democratic project; that it puts questions in to beyond-question natural science. For such a project however, clear popularising of what scientific work is being done, plus investigations of what scientific developments are being followed and what not followed, and who is financing and patenting such work, is much more to the point.

Darwinian theory
The analogies taken from science and used in the most racist and inegalitarian manner are clearly those taken from the Darwinian theory of evolution. That it is his version that should set the tone and change the world, that and its timing, is also evidence of the theory as in part a 'social construct', one suited to the dominant culture of a recently industrialised and colonising Britain. It doesn't need Social Text or its theorists to tell us. Sinyavsky may have a spiritual axe to grind but is not far off when saying that: 
"the theory of evolution has a hint of parody about it and arouses the suspicion that it originated under the influence of the factory, which inspired the basic analogies and suggested the idea of progress as a world-wide conveyor-belt." (A Voice from the Chorus). 
Neither Darwin nor the geologist Lyell can fail to have been influenced by the Industrial Revolution in which small, imperceptible changes had made a revolution, and created markets in which a failure of flexibility, a failure to adapt were punished by market forces.
Analogy then is used both ways, in undeclared fashion in some scientific theorising, and then back again into the social world. Neo-liberalism/old lassez faire has never ceased to use Darwinian analogy: survival of the fittest as smugly articulated by US Treasury Secretary O'Neill for example at the World Economic Forum of 2002. Or yet another management guru book this year from Seth Godin in which he argues that what biology has learned by studying the struggle for survival 'can inform us as we think about the struggle for products for market share; firms for talent; countries for tax base; or start-ups for venture capital'. The firm for political influence and public money might be closer to the mark! This follows on directly from the Social Darwinist, Herbert Spencer who coined the 'survival of the fittest' phrase. He was worried by the domestic British underclass, and in modern neo-liberal fashion (or Manchester liberalism as it was then called), opposed state intervention even in the matter of sewage. Using Darwin he could rationalise the extermination of that underclass if, for example, cholera could be kept to the ghettos. 
What is historically perverse, and remains so, is that the other prop of capitalist economic ideology, that is neo-classical economics which emerges soon after Darwin, uses a completely different analogical framework from natural sciences. As Stephen Toulmin has pointed out, late 19th century economists sought to become the Newtons of the human sciences and elaborated their neo-classical equilibria in supposed imitation of his Principa Mathematica. Extraordinary how they got away with it when the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the mathematics of Poincare (these both before Quantum Physics) clearly implied how limited the Newtonian model was. An anti-temporal model which can stomach neither just Marx, nor Adam Smith.
Spencer was not interested in colonies or colonisation but an inhumane and truly repulsive racism which was present in the Darwinian view of the world attracted others. It has been used by racists ever since, and is also dependent on two-way analogy. 18th and 19th century scientific exploration was driven largely by economic and colonial ambitions with a fundamentalist edge to it, that is for European men to show their own superiority to themselves, and thus justify their entitlement to the rest of the world. Prim, uptight people like Darwin who, when first encountering naked Fuegians on the Beagle voyage wrote: "I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilised man. It is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal."
The analogy between men and animals, types of men, gave credence to rationalisations of a genocidal process of plunder. It is said that Alfred Wallace who had also hit on the idea of natural selection, 'was convinced that the wonderfully intricate ecosystems of the tropics were not made for man alone and that he loved their native inhabitants whom he found more graceful, ethical and democratic than Europeans. It was not however his version of evolution we have come to know, it is Darwin's who, in 1859 in a letter to Lyell, thought that the process of natural selection might also occur between the human races, "the less intellectual races being exterminated." It is said that he was horrified by first hand experience of racist genocides in Argentina and Tasmania but it obviously was not enough to deter him from going public with the thought of the letter in The Descent of Man (1871): "At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace throughout the world, the savage races." With such a lead it was hardly difficult for monstrous theorists like Robert Knox to rationalise the genocides that were to happen on an even greater scale in Africa, and to do it without reference to the civilising mission of Christianity.
And so it goes on, 'Social Darwinism, only nowadays it's worse, with the Spencerian and racist strands tied together. In the face of all the evidence provided by many geneticist like the scrupulous and tolerant Reith lecturer Dr Steve Jones to the contrary, people like Charles Murray and his Bell Curve still now have not just credence but an impact on social policy with theories which invariably claim inherited differences in intelligence on racial grounds where the so-called underclass is also racially defined. 
Its impact has been on welfare policies in a period when capital has decided it can no longer afford to be decent and more specifically been both a pre- and post-event rationalisation of the truly awesome number of Afro-Americans in prison, and the even greater number otherwise restrained by the US legal system.

Marx and the Darwinian
In the light of all this, it is sobering that Marx would have liked to dedicate Capital to Darwin, and that it was only Darwin's bourgeois fear of being associated with such a disreputable person which prevented it. One can see the attraction for Marx; Darwin as the demystifier, the revolutionary with a template of progress, a scientific template, whereas in fact it meant that time necessarily involving change could be restricted to the bio-geological sphere. Ironies abound here because like Sinyavsky a hundred years later, Marx wrote privately of how Darwinism was Manchester liberalism writ large. History in effect was allowed in the biological long term, but even then it derived from the existing conditions of capitalism.
Looked at now, the desire of Marx to create a scientific socialism, has become a terrible burden, one which made the rigidities, distortions, stupidities and crimes of Marxism-Leninism seem like continuity from Marx himself. Looked at now, it is a shame how notions of historical laws like falling rate of profit, have obscured the complex description of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and its countervailing tendencies, one which illuminates much of what is happening now in the 21st century as does the analysis of equalization of rate of profit. I suspect that in the case of Marx the need for it to be scientific socialism is partly because at the time it was de rigeur if one was to be taken seriously but also to bolster the spirits with the thought that one day a humanist communism would have to come about. 
The increased emphasis on scientific socialism is normally blamed on Engels and his Dialectics of Nature but it is not justified, it was a joint project. He has though been accused by hard-line ecologist Robin Jenkins of deliberately repressing the significance of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics because he well understood that this clearly implied limits to the economic growth that would render capitalist property relations untenable, and limits to the general idea of progress. 
Certainly the Christian intellectual Dean Inge welcomed entropy on precisely this score, but at the same time felt "that the sum of things should end in nothingness is a painful stultification of our belief in the values of life." Ilya Prigorgine on the other hand suggests that the irreversibility implied by the 2nd Law strengthened 'the idea of an historical development of nature', the very idea that had attracted Marx and Engels to the Darwinian theory of evolution.
The 2nd Law which states that in all transfers of energy, energy is lost, and disorganisation increases to the point of entropy has been used analogically in the service of many ideas beyond its scope. I do not believe it should be used at all in relation to human social relations whether 'progressive' or otherwise. It is this law which undermines the Newtonian equilibria by asserting the irreversibility of some processes, and thus the 'arrow of time', but this 'historical' natural law is still just that, a natural law.

Quantum Physics
Some forty to fifty years later Quantum Physics knocks away the props of equilibria some more. It was, and remains, exciting stuff, but it too produced its analogisers which are taken apart in a wonderful book of the 1930's, L. Susan Stebbings' Philosophy and the Physicists. She too is excited, and as a democrat committed to a well informed and critically intelligent public: sympathetic to popularised accounts of Quantum Physics she is sharp on analogies which far from clarifying, confuse or are misleading. 
This often took the form of anthropomorphism (and still does, 'nature does this, and nature does that') and at other times is used to justify a form of philosophical idealism. "It is odd," she says, "to find the view that 'all is mysterious' is to be regarded as a sign of hope. The rejection of the 'billiard-ball view' of matter (i.e. Newtonian-based false analogies of the atom with astronomy) does not warrant the leap to any form of Idealism." Aware of this she notes that Lenin too was worried about the new physics on precisely this score but is somewhat sceptical as to his understanding it, and his ideological methodology. Another of those ironies that is bound to arise when leftists tangle with natural sciences as a source of ideology, is that Anton Pannekoek in his "Lenin and Philosophy" argued that Lenin himself is philosophically an idealist.
Stebbings is especially stringent on two points: an intellectual slither that allows the concepts of Quantum Physics to be applied to the everyday world; and the way analogy dressed as argument was being used to assert 'free-will'. Both of these have re-appeared to lurk in the dodgy analogies of computer age theorising wherein almost anything that is non-Newtonian, that is 'mysterious', must be good. On the first point she quotes Ernst Zimmer: "A table, a piece of paper, no longer possesses that solid reality which they appear to possess; they are both of them porous and consist of very small electrically charged particles which are arranged in a particular way." If that is the case, as she asks, what does solid mean if nothing is solid?
In the matter of free will, it was true that a previous scientific determinism said it was an illusion, but to make of quantum physics and especially Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, that cause and effect are out of the window and the electron 'free to choose', and then from this make it a safeguard of human freedom from science is not sustainable... "Either way," she says of pre-and post-Quantum Physics, "this use of physical science to countenance a theory of interaction of humans is unwarranted." When cause and effect are out of the game in the social world we are on very dangerous ground as we can see for example in the US attitude to Kyoto.
Given this history, it is not altogether surprising that it is this physics which Sokal used in his analogical spoofs: asserting for example that Lacan's psychoanalytic speculations have been confirmed by recent work in quantum field theory; that Quantum Physics is consonant with 'postmodernist epistemology'; and then making a more inclusive pastiche on the same lines held together with words like nonlinearity, flux and interconnectedness, with Deleuze one of his targets. These are the buzzwords of the computer age theories of Chaos, Complexity and Emergence in which the non-localised phenomenon of QP has also been prominent, and which yet again cannot resist analogies with the world of 'human interactions'.

The Selfish Dawkins
Other theorising with analogical overtones have also been given a new lease of life by the computer age. Here I am thinking especially of Richard Dawkins, his selfish gene and his memes. Dawkins is an inveterate maker of analogies between natural sciences and the social-political world. In the 1989 edition of The Selfish Gene he starts to apologise but cannot help still defending the analogy of 'the working people of Britain' as individuals not understanding the need to restrain their greed for the good of the whole group. If it was wrong it was because '"actually it's best not to burden scientific work with political asides at all." Why? Because they become dated, a comment which then allows him to turn this apology into an attack on J.B.S. Haldane.
There is also a kind of heroic masochism in his insistence on the primacy of the gene and its replication, with the species (including humans and therefore himself) having the role merely of its carrier. Replication of code being at the centre of this model, the computer age provides an analogy-become real, since it is also inherent to its technology. Thus he now writes of the possibility, that in his writing slides into likelihood, of the self-evolution of software code. With a generalisation breathtaking in its pomposity he writes, "Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information," just as for Zimmer it was electrically charged particles. At the same time he takes the same model into the social world with the notion of memes, 'media viruses', or as Dawkins puts it, "non-genetic replicators which flourish only in the environment provided by complex communicating brains." "The apparatus of inter-individual communication and imitation" is then analogous to the gene's concern with its replication. But the gene and meme must also have a phenotypic effect that allows it to survive into the next generation. On the face of it, this seems to depend on the discredited Lamarckian notion that acquired characteristics can be passed on to others or genetically to the next generation, a theory which caused havoc to Soviet farmers following Lysenko, and has come up again recently in the Motorola-financed research of Sadie Plant which purports to show that Western teenagers sending text messages have developed more flexible thumbs, and that this is, or rather will be, evolutionary. 
Allowing Dawkins his meme for the moment, he tells us that whether it is an idea or a tune, it must to be popular. "If it is a political or religious idea, it may assist its own survival if one of its phenotypic effects is to make its bodies violently intolerant of new and unfamiliar ideas...If the society is already dominated by Marxist or Nazi memes, any new meme's replicatory success will be influenced by its compatibility with this existing background." In which case, we could well do without memes altogether since they would have to be both conformist and intolerant to successfully replicate. Fortunately we are doing without them, these analogies-made-real. It also implies, the meme as idea, a passivity on the part of receptors. It is this characteristic which it has in common with some of the ways in which Chaos/Complexity/Emergence theory has been used. "The marvel of the 'hive mind' as Kelly put it, "emerges from very dumb members."

Spooky butterflies
If Darwinian theory has the whiff of the factory about it, Complexity theory has not just the whiff, but has been enabled by the number-crunching capacity of computers and their networking facility. In one important respect it has also followed the phenomenon of Quantum Physics that Susan Stebbing did not touch on, that is the concept of non-locality, what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance", whereby atomic particles, widely separated, are somehow in instantaneous contact with each other. Again, it is to be remembered that this is a world of sub-atomic particles, but one can see how the 'butterfly effect' of Complexity theory, must have been inspired by it even if it is not so radical in its implications. Inspired by it and the holistic 'spaceship earth' notion which flourished briefly after the first landings on the moon, until it reverted to the neo-liberal version of globalization. 
With the butterfly effect there is still a strong element of cause and effect, even if it is the case that a small cause may have a big effect far away. To be clear here, I have no intention of dissing theories and phenomenon lumped together as New Age, like the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, the energy emissions of rocks, or those telepathic experiences we have probably all experienced; nor of a holistic view of the world or ourselves. What does need to be looked at warily though is the vague assumption that anything which claims to be non-Newtonian or non-reductionist, de-centralised, or holistic is good in itself. Not all management gurus are Darwinian, management guru Richard Pascale has urged a "holistic" approach to management and Tom Peters, management evangelist entitled one of his recent best-sellers, "Thriving on Chaos".
In the case of the 'butterfly effect' it's as well to remind its theorists that BIG causes in one part of the world have even bigger effects in other parts and that these are located in fixed positions, with the underdeveloped world invariably the passive receptor of mostly negative effects caused by 57 varieties of self-interest in the first world. Since they believe that moving "world society in a desired direction via deliberative democratic process" to be a naïve illusion, they do not welcome this reminder. It is also not accidental that Castoriades should be in their line of fire, he as a theorist of workers self-management, decentralisation of authority and organisation from below, for on the face of it complexity theory seems to be on the same side so to speak, holding out the same promise. It is not the case.

Out of Control
It is perhaps unfair to pick on Kevin Kelly and his book Out of Control, given that he is a magpie of across the board natural sciences examples used in Chaos/Complexity/Emergence theory, but in the end he is important because he can't help but give the game away. He rushes the reader through a series of analogies using as his connector the phrase, 'very much as in', from hive, to whirlpool, to the brain, and to a colony of ants. In the chapter 'Machines with Attitude', we get a tour de force of flim-flam, jumped from quote to idea and back again. He begins with a quote from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, "The idea that the brain has a centre is just wrong. Not only that, it is radically wrong." At this point one is already wondering where this is going, given that Dennett is also a fanatical supporter of Richard Dawkins and ferocious attacker of holistic biologists like Richard Lewontein. His being used by Kelly is an early signal that despite the apparent complete difference in outlook there may be something similar going on between the 'determinist' Dawkins and Complexity theory, that is an underlying notion of human passivity. 
From Dennett he moves to saying that the collapse of the USSR is solely ascribable to the instability of any centrally controlled complexity; to an approving reference to 'the bureaucracy of the brain'; to the notion that "there is no 'I', for a person, for a beehive, a corporation'; to the unacknowledged analogy from Quantum Physics that it is likely that intelligence is a probabilistic or statistical phenomenon. Suitably softened up from this scatter gun, we are then hit by Roger Brook's notion (one he is developing technologically) that "You can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless in itself." This is just one version of the essence of Complexity/Emergence theory, that is 'the generation of higher-level behaviour or structures within systems made up of relatively simple components'. And it is attractive with its promise of the non-hierarchic, and one can see that the wonderful internet and its World Wide Web is a realised paradigm. But if it goes further, and the web itself is the analogical basis for a whole view of the world, it becomes a rationale for the privileged of the world, when there is no one for the rest of the world to negotiate with for something better for themselves. 
Writing of Roger Brook's use of small robots he says "With no centrally imposed model, no one has the job of reconciling disputed notions; they simply aren't reconciled. Instead various signals generate various behaviours. The behaviours are sorted out (suppressed, delayed, activated) in the web hierarchy of subsumed control." Then in a brazen piece of reader flattery and final candour he says, "Astute observers have noticed that Brooks' prescription is an exact description of a market economy." Brooks? The market economy is also where Kelly's hive analogies take us. It could equally well be von Hayek and his capitalist utopia of wholly rational consumers and their preferences; their simple but rational decisions making an economy that runs itself.
Kelly of course has to ascribe it to someone else, Roger Brooks, because at the same time he has a self-image as the rebel, the heroic pioneer. This romanticisation seems to be common to the users of dodgy analogy. It informs the tone of Richard Dawkins and those other serial analogisers, Deleuze and Guattari, the first of whom was outed for dodgy analogising by Sokal, but who would seem to be the complete antithesis to neo-liberal ideology given that they are 68ers who would certainly have been sympathetic to Castoriades' ideas in the days of Socialisme ou Barbarie. In their understandable reaction against the disaster of Marxism-Leninism, the non-hierarchical becomes an end in itself. In their understandable desire to celebrate this quality in the World Wide Web, they have recourse to the rhizome, an analogy taken from plant roots, and this analogy takes the place of argument. They can't stop there either but must then make an analogy out of nomads and create a self-image of the techno-nomad who, ironically is just another variety of elitist vanguard, the outsider variety who, though not a capitalist, is one of the world's relatively privileged. 
 

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Bloody Hell
A report from Ramallah from an American nurse & humanitarian aid worker

Tuesday April 2
Bloody hell. Just got out of Ramallah yesterday, managed to catch a ride to the checkpoint with the Associated Press in their bullet-proof vehicle, then walked across with a few bullet-proof vested/helmeted journalists, me in my scrubs do not know how to describe what is happening in Ramallah, but I will try. I must I am here (Gaza, Bethlehem, Ramallah, then Lebanon) for 6 weeks, working as a volunteer for the PCRF (Palestine Children's Relief Fund-a non-profit, non-political, humanitarian relief organization). Teaching NRP/NICU stuff, bringing donated supplies, and consulting for potential future relief efforts. I had been in Ramallah since the 23rd March. On 28th, the situation appeared to get worse, with 150 tanks surrounding Ramallah and closures put into effects I had been staying at the hospital since Thursday--it was safer and I was useful there; not really teaching much anymore but instead working ER, OR, NICU, or wherever needed an extra nurse. The staff that could make it in was working back to back shifts, walking past tanks to get to and from work or sleeping at the hospital. Everybody not anaemic donated blood. All supplies are running low, sometimes there was not enough food. The ambulances are prevented from transporting the wounded, or any other patients or staff--they were stopped and arrested, and the ambulances were then used by the Israelis in house to house searches and executions. The patients that were able to make it to the hospital in time were gun shot wounds--mostly to abd. and chest, or head. I saw many corpses with close range wounds/ execution style. The morgue is over-full. The Israelis are lying about what is happening--i.e. they did enter Ramallah hospital on Sunday, I was there. The press is censured [sic]--unable to report what is occurring as they are also prevented/detained, threatened, injured, or escorted out. I am hearing that the news in the States is very pro-Israeli as usual. How is this allowed? There are many major human rights issues here.
I feel helpless to do anything. I wish now that I would have stayed in Ramallah. I am a nurse, and a human being. It was very hard to leave, but the hospital staff advised me to go, to get out when I could. They were very afraid about what might happen (and now is happening). I am safe in Jerusalem now, but feel useless-unable to do anything except write emails. And today the situation there is so much worse--the press just told me that now snipers are firing at anyone leaving the Ramallah hospital. In Bethlehem today the Israelis are targeting churches, have shot and killed a priest and also shot a nun--and the situation is the same for the hospital there, no one allowed in or out. They continue to surround Arafat's compound, cutting off water, food, electricity, and any contact. They shot Palestinians trying to surrender, in their underwear. They continue to conduct house to house searches and executions, they are casting a wide net and arresting many, many people--I saw trucks filled with blindfolded Palestinians pass by the hospital. There were major bombings done early this morning, many people must be hurt or dead. I can't think of anything else to say right now--the situation is unimaginable. I have no words for this except to plea; "please help stop this". Americans need to know what is happening, they need to pay attention. They need to be aware that their news is very biased; they need to search for the truth, and the causes of symptoms such as suicide bombers. They need to re-evaluate their definition of terrorism and who the terrorists are, to include politics that would oppress another people so hard and for so long. All need to take responsibility for our own government's actions and inactions. Please, at least, pray for all the people here--esp. in Ramallah and Bethlehem... am very tired. I'll try to email more later.

Wed. April 3
Here's an update: spoke with the director of the Ramallah hospital--they are running out of medicines, supplies, and oxygen. There are still many casualties and dead in the streets that they are unable to get to. They are worried about diseases that come with having a morgue full again, and garbage in the streets piled high, and unable to get to or bury the dead. They were able to bury 29 bodies yesterday in a mass grave, during a lift of the curfew for a few hours--but soldiers still shot at people in the streets even during this time, killing a 10 yr old boy. There is no electricity, no food and now no water at the hospital. A female doctor was killed in Jenin. In Bethlehem yesterday, they targeted churches--shot and killed a priest, and injured six nuns. They are now shooting at priests that have come to the check point to try to get in to Bethlehem. The hospital and ambulances there are also unable to get to the injured. The press just arrived back to the hotel, telling me that the convoy of supplies trying to get into Ramallah will not be let in.
Some of the babies in the NICU will die without oxygen--of all the indisputable innocents.

Thurs. April 4
I don't even know where to start anymore--except to say that the situation is even worse. There are hundreds of calls to the ambulances at Ramallah every day, pleading for help for the critically sick and injured--but they still are not allowed to do anything or transport anyone. I spoke with a Finnish researcher who was allowed out of Ramallah yesterday who says that there are medical persons detained, along with hundreds of Palestinians. She said that there are hundreds of injured in the bombed areas of Ramallah that are unable to get help. As for Bethlehem, I spoke with press who had been able to get part way in yesterday before being chased out by soldiers, reporting that "every door has been blow open, riddled with bullets", dead bodies behind the doors, a missile in a child's bedroom, "water pipes everywhere are totally destroyed". "This is the most horrible vandalism imaginable--clearly just for punishment" of the Palestinian people. The Israeli soldiers abide by no rule--shooting anyone now. They have expanded the militarized zones, and are not allowing journalists, or anyone in. They do not want anyone seeing what they are doing--this is the most frightening. Peaceful demonstrations at the check points are targeted with tear gas, international convoys of supplies are not allowed in. The situation at the hospitals remains critical--their supplies, medicines, and oxygen are running out. The Ramallah hospital was able to get three oxygen cylinders two days ago, but convoys of medical supplies and food were not allowed in at all yesterday. There is not enough food, either at the hospital or for the rest of Ramallah. There is still no water or electricity--I can not imagine how the medical staff is coping, the nurses in the neonatal unit must be taking turns ventilating the babies by hand with whatever oxygen they have left. How long can the rest of the world watch this, doing nothing?
PLEASE AT LEAST LET THE FOOD, WATER AND MEDICAL SUPPLIES IN!

The Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement between People, 64 Star Street, P.O. Box 24
http://www.rapprochement.org
The centre is a non-profit making NGO, started in 1988 during the first Intifada. PCR runs community service programs, youth empowerment and training programs. PCR is also very much involved in the non-violent resistance against the Israeli Occupation to Palestine. 
 

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Tales of the Great Unwashed
Ian Brotherhood

Frank was happy. He'd always been happy, but he couldn't remember ever feeling as happy as he was now. 
He shifted back into fourth and overtook the log-bearing artic. He didn't often overtake, even on this dual carriageway, but hated sitting behind these larger vehicles. The sets of double-wheels were a worry. You never knew where these trucks had been uplifting or delivering, perhaps on open building sites. Da knew of a friend of a friend--a truck had picked up a half-brick lodged between the rear wheels. The friend of the friend had been keeping a safe stopping distance from the lorry. The lorry increased speed, so did the friend of the friend, still maintaining a safe distance. The increased speed gave force enough to the lodged stone, and when it was released from the wheels it followed a trajectory which brought it across the safe distance, through the windscreen and into the head of the friend of the friend's nine year old son in the passenger seat.
Frank felt himself smile as his new two-litre estate surged past the log-bearing truck. Another little problem sorted.
And that's where the new estate and the new house and the new life had come from. Sorting out one problem after another, no matter how small. Directing attention to every possible source of anguish or upset and dealing with it as and when it arose. The early days were distant now, and only ever recollected to bolster the happiness he had found with Francie. The children had been unexpected, but only ever added joy to their lives. Jamie had only just turned two, was safely strapped into his seat, and beside him, her head resting on her brother's shoulder, the older Kelly was already nodding off.
He tightened his right palm about the cushioned steering wheel and gently dropped his left fingers onto Francie's thigh. Her fingers covered his and gently pressed them against the warm denim. He didn't have to look at her to know that she was smiling. Even this, just a simple weekly shopping trip, was a treat.
He veered onto the exit just as the carriageway lamp-masts flickered red. A glance at the digital clock--almost seven o'clock. The clocks would be shifted forward on Sunday, Summer would be official. There would be ever-lengthening evenings in the garden, tinkering with sweet-pea netting and twisting custom-length plastic-coated wire about strategically placed canes; wiping down the brilliant white plastic furniture in advance of a neighbourly visit ; exotically varied salad greens tossed and sprinkled with ready-made dressing in the conversation-piece carved mahogany bowl Francie had picked up at the boot-sale; jokes and beer and laughter in open-air, with kids safely asleep upstairs as they drew cardigans and sweat-shirts against the freshening coastal breeze. And conversation. Relaxed, assured exchange between people who had at last found their place in the world. Francie wouldn't say much. She never did. But Frank would speak for both of them, of their happiness, their gratitude, their sense of completeness.
The short-stay car-park was full. Not a problem. The long-stay was slightly further from the mall, but convenient trolley-parks meant that the kids could be transported to the centre without exertion. Kelly protested at being woken so suddenly after having found sleep, but Jamie was content to sit in the trolley-seat, chubby fingers tightly gripping the thin steel bar. Francie had to delve into her purse for a pound-coin for the other trolley. Kelly refused to be lowered into the seat--at five she was a big girl and wanted freedom to browse and wander, just like her mum.
The floodlights scanning the pyramidal glass mall signalled a wave of drizzle, but Frank saw it and beckoned Francie hurry to the covered pavement leading to the hypermart. The first cold heavy drops of the shower did hit them, but with the walk from the car no more than fifty yards it was little more than a refreshing surprise, and Frank shook his head, feigning shock to Jamie's smiling face, and Jamie responded as he did these days, shaking and aping whatever noise Dad made.
My cup is full. Frank remembered the words from God only knows where. It meant you couldn't want more. I've as much as I can handle. It couldn't get any better because there's no more capacity for happiness, there's no space for additional pleasures. My cup is full, yours can be too. It had always seemed to induce a sort of paralysis in the trainees.
Trainees. Apprentices. Proteges. And wasn't Frank once himself one of them? Hadn't he taken on those roles, played them to their natural, inevitable conclusion, then moved on? The others had only to do likewise, to follow that same process. Simple.
The massive stone obelisk at the entrance to the store was mounted on a brick-built plinth. Fr