Because we don’t remember the seasons so much, but we remember disagreements, quarrels, and discussions. These define what we call time. And seasons are essential for food. Emotions, however, for the soul. And that’s why emotional time is different. We have winter.
We proudly present a new track by our friend, Yuki K. It´s… we would say, jazzy… but… find it out… here (external link, which leads you to bandcamp):
We are proud to present you with the track “My Generation” by Sopocki. Sopocki is a young DJ, he lives in Sopot (maybe not right now) in Poland.
Sometimes it is the tension that makes a work or a track interesting. In his first track, Sopocki created tension between the fast beat and the voice (no singing, so no fear). In doing so, he breaks the boundaries of trance. And at the same time combines the “classic” beat with the modern point of view. Art? Definitely. A little Christmas present from us.
You can find the track (but also others) here (external link to Soundcloud): https://soundcloud.com/user-883042571/sopocki-my-generation
The Crow says:
Everything is here. Now. Always.
So is autumn. And the memories of it.
We are proud to present a new track by Yuki K. Yuki, a Hamburg-based musician, and writer.
Here (a very external link):
Honestly, I cannot remember when I heard about them for the first time. It must be ten or eleven years ago. Or maybe longer. But I can remember, I read it is the best music level at that time. And I can remember that as I recommended Blackest ever Black to a friend, he asked me why the whole label was not a band. Yeah. Why the label? Let us see.
Of course. What means „black“? We can start the discussion now, on what black means in western culture and how we can read it, and what we can think about it. But at this moment we don`t have a cultural discussion here but try to describe a music level specialized in electronic music. So… color plays a role. Obviously.
The music is something magical. Maybe something we shouldn’t really write about. I can remember that I then forgot about the label for a few years. It must have been two or three years later when I rediscovered it. It was just one band, but it was very important. And not only for me. Maybe it gave the feeling of the 2010s again. For sure. And what were they like? Black. And another thing… but I don’t want to describe that. It’s better when you listen to it.
Derrida once said that ghosts live in phone calls. That when we are called, or watch a movie, we can then encounter a ghost. But when we dream, the spirits are there to touch. Like the dream from last summer. Or of the one that is to come. Or of the perfect summer that we are experiencing now.
We proudly present a new track by Yuki K. Summer Dreams. Here (external link): https://zenvampires.bandcamp.com/track/summer-dreams
Gilles Deleuze says, that repetitions are differences of differences. And each spring is different from the other. That’s how we recognize it. However, these differences give us hope. But we have to recognize, that the future will never become the present.
We proudly present a new track by Yuki K. Here (external link) https://zenvampires.bandcamp.com/track/spring-desires
The photo is made by Inky. She is a young model and photographer from Nairobi, Kenya. You can follow her work on Instagram @sueyoncehadasa.
We are proud to present another essay by Tomasz Kozak on zenvampires. Tomasz Kozak is a theoretician and visual artist combining philosophy, political sciences, and video art. He is an associate professor at the UMCS Institute of Fine Arts in Lublin, Poland. Currently, he works on a book inspired by Mark Fisher’s concept of libertarian communism.
Dead Kennedys once shouted out the Westerner’s hard-core blues. So much hate and so much pity. It’s such a bore; it gets me really sore. Gag with every breath. So I’m looking forward to death!
These days, we suddenly find ourselves in a world that is a far cry from boring. A traditional Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’, updates exponentially – through every move made by Russian jingoism during the invasion of Ukraine. So most of our societies will bid farewell to boredom in the days to come.
But some of us plan to remain dull. Certain red celebrities attest that by insisting on old songs: demented and daunting.
Take Noam Chomsky. In the 4 February interview for Truthout, he was so preoccupied with a new concert of Great Powers, with tuning into Russian concerns, that he ‘forgot’ of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv. And yet it did happen. It proved Ukraine is not a pawn but an independent and determinate agent. And as for self-determination, it hasalways made the very basis of socialist anti-imperialism. Mr Chomsky should be aware of so fundamental a fact.
There’s also Yannis Varoufakis: an advocate of Ukrainian neutrality. On his and DiEM25 part, he proves reluctant to mind a critical factor. Putinist Russia can hardly be filed under ‘peace- loving’ or ‘agreement-honouring’. As some stillremember, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, signed by the Russian Federation, guaranteed Ukraine territorial integrity in return for giving up nuclear weapons. In 2014, Putin killed the deal by the annexation of Crimea. Had the Ukrainians kept their nukes, would the aggression have been possible? Not bothered by the question, Varoufakisans are still happy to solicit the unilateral demilitarization. It’s not to be the Russian one, clearly.
These pronouncements are compassionate to the far-right regime’s complaints (e.g., the alleged NATO threat) andtacitly friendly to the ‘sphere of influence’ concept. Since its meaning cannot be decoupled from the imperialist tenets, those left-wingers who stick to it find themselves in an idiotic (pardon my French, aporetic) position. They will become inadvertent sidekicks of an aggressor.
Infuriating?
As a leftist, I was infuriated. Choking with Chomsky’s smug dictums and Varoufakis’ counselling, I waited for someoneto fire soldierly expletives upon them. But then the spirits of the Classics stepped in and advised: A fistful of reminders will do.
So here you are. Socialism cannot reduce itself to non-violent idealism. The Left at its peak was bellicose and hencecapable of revolution. One could scarcely see Marx as a pacifist. According to him, pacifism contributed greatly to bourgeois ideology with the belief that too many devastating conflicts would lower stock prices. ‘War depresses thequotations of the three and four per cents!’ Hence ‘Peace everywhere and always!’
Sadly, ‘peace’ becomes a meaningless vocable when facilitated through dealings with a barbarian who revels intrampling on agreements. Marx and Engels then make themselves clear: ‘buttermilk pacifism’ (stale, soured, scared) ishardly a template for communists to follow. ‘No doubt, peace is the ultimate necessity of civilization; but what is peace with Nicholas of Russia?’ Since the tsar operates as a ‘disemboweller of whole nations’, suspension of hostilities between ‘mankind’ and ‘this madman’ would be cowardice and crime (The Manifesto of M. De Lamartine) . Communism must engage in revolutionary actions that entail, inter alia, military intervention against the fiend (GermanForeign Policy and the Latest Events in Prague).
One thus could scarcely imagine the two men being empathetic Zar-Versteher. The same goes for the idea of empathizing with Putin. He is the fascist who not only employs manifest neo- Nazis (recall SS-runes-tattooed Wagner mercenaries marking Tripoli with swastikas) but also fancies the overall destruction of everything socialists care for:human and animal rights, self- determination, national liberation, social equality, sustainable development.
The young Marx fashioned an evergreen appraisal of such a danger. Where the playing-with- fire oligarchy assumesunlimited power – there must emerge a regime ‘wherein wealth derived from gambling naturally seeks its satisfaction, where pleasure becomes debauch, where money, filth and blood commingle’ (The Class Struggles in France, 1848–1850).
Putinist kleptocracy reboots this paradigm. It gambles with the same lusts, seeks the same pleasures. Only that it grows to be a global monster on genocidal steroids. So, instead of placating the full-frontal beast, the Left should grow belligerent.
That said, I share the common fear of nuclear war. We face a loose cannon armed with the button. Therefore, it’simpossible to simply dust off an old Marxian new-year plan: ‘The table of contents for 1849 reads … world war.’ (The Revolutionary Movement) It had better not happen in 2022. On the other hand, socialists cannot just brush red bellicosityoff. It would be naïve to convince Putinism into self- limitation by the power of our peacefulness.
The hard-to-embrace truth is that the endgame of Russian oligarchs can be apocalyptic regardless of Western conciliatoriness. Backing down may not suffice to save the world as we know it. The Left has to get it. Also, no danger posed by transatlantic capitalism will turn out equally substantial in the nearest future. So we need to ally against Putinism with American and European liberals. And even – brace yourselves for the heresy – with NATO.
It isn’t a matter of our boredom-brewed death drive, once ridiculed by Dead Kennedys. Quite the opposite, the survivalof values and material amenities dear to both socialism and liberalism will be at stake. Wanna save your freedoms and luxuries, reform your societies and countries? Care to revive great hopes for your fellow citizens? Well, you must defend them. Sometimes with a pen, keyboard, camera, a painting or book – and sometimes with the MIM-104 Patriot.
Radical reds cannot then regress into a shelter of complacent pacifism. Instead, we need to see that the desired ‘patriotism’ proves progressive. And our satisfactions – egalitarian, just, creative.
Those who crave better life must be forward to fight.
We are proud to present an essay by Tomasz Kozak. Tomasz Kozak is a theoretician and visual artist combining philosophy, political sciences, and video art. He is an associate professor at the UMCS Institute of Fine Arts in Lublin, Poland. Currently, he works on a book inspired by Mark Fisher’s concept of libertarian communism.
The Mature Marx employs the metaphor of orchestra so as to illustrate the organisational gist of labour in corporate capitalism. Each self has a great deal of individual freedom, yet at the end of or rather during the working day, they must do as they’re told by managers. ‘A single violin player is his own conductor; an orchestra requires a separate one.’ (Capital) In order to secure the ‘harmonious’ working of the separated activities, management oversees atomised ‘organs’ in accordance with precise scripts similar to sheet music. One may venture to say (ironically or not, depending on more or less ambiguous attunement) that such notations have largely contributed to the development of ‘a world literature’, once heralded with ambivalent fascination in The Communist Manifesto.
Now, however fascinating capitalist orchestrations may appear, communism must counter-measure them accordingly. As early as paradigmatic and energising, one such attempt comes into play in young Engels’ Letters from London (1843).
Here emerge savvy workers immersed in scriptures of Paine and Shelley, Rousseau and Voltaire. The bookworms prove rebels taking on state religion. ‘It happens frequently that Christianity is directly attacked and Christians are called “our enemies”.’ But proletarian gestures are a far cry from undialectical univocality. Anger synergises with wit; meetings turn into waggish travesties of ‘church gatherings’. So ‘in the gallery a choir accompanied by an orchestra sings social hymns; these consist of semi-religious or wholly religious melodies with communist words’. As for the agitators, they make stand-up comedians. ‘Then, quite nonchalantly … a lecturer comes on to the platform’ and ‘delivers his address, which usually gives much occasion for laughter, for in these speeches the English intellect expresses itself in superabundant humour.’ Jocular agitation needs pick-me-ups. And there you go! ‘In one corner of the hall is a stall where books and pamphlets are sold and in another a booth with oranges and refreshments, where everyone can obtain what he needs or to which he can withdraw if the speech bores him.’ No wonder people turn out in droves: ‘during my stay in Manchester I saw the Communist Hall, which holds about 3,000 people, crowded every Sunday’.
Redallelujah!
The ludic-orchestral element updates itself via G.A. Cohen’s Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995). In his view, advanced Marxian communism’s social structure should resemble a jazz band, where every single self is entitled to their solo act: self-fulfillment. Syncopated dynamics of various fulfilments (economic, existential, political) counterpointing one another in egalitarian and just manners – creates a multi-track expanse of productive liberty. And no conducting authority, let alone top-down disciplinary superintendence, is needed. People manage to inter-play democratically, deriving multilateral satisfactions from horizontal self-organisation.
Cohen, an old geezer entrenched in All Souls College, Oxford, came up with a jazzy construal of classical Marxism in the mid-1990s. At exactly the same time, post-rave youngsters were permutating (recall Amon Tobin’s album) jazz and funk into new genres: jungle, drum and bass, breakbeat hardcore. They used to sample quotes from old records and compress them into post-industrial breaks: short sounds (beats, scratches, noises, glitches) shot at revolted listeners.
Collisions of sonic molecules – both subversive and hedonistic – inadvertently revamped the Epicurean and Bloomian concept of clinamen. Latin-derived clinamen denotes a deflection of atoms that let them collide with one another freely (Epicurus, Lucretius) or allow each to contest hitherto trajectories and thus play whimsically with tradition (Bloom).
According to Bloom, so transgressive a swerve is by no means an innocuous play game. It can be a risky business, for the transgression, deviating from customary routes and routines, hazards a downfall into an abyss. Milton’s Satan proves a paradigmatic deflector in such a conjuncture – he ends up at the bottom of hell. Fortunately, we may resort to Marx, whose doctoral thesis on the Epicurean atomism consoled us regarding the threat of damnation. The after-life hell for individuals exists no more than the alike ‘hell of the populace’. Miscreants wanting to diverge for good and bid those who have left sod-off farewell – are allowed to whoosh by scattering into the non-judgemental beyond.
Should the rest decide to keep up the fight, we ought to engage in small, medium, and large-scale clashes. And in the spirit of bellicosity, I call for a big band of badass theorists.
Let them be funky old farts, rejuvenated rockists, growling gamers, and guerrilla glitchers. Oh, but this motley crew must also be a gang of well-versed professors. I want an academic riff-raff riffing on Marx and Engels. Arm them with pens, as red as hell. They will abduct children of Christian democrats and sodomise Tory altar boys with queer quotes. I’m waiting for a neo-Marxism invasion. Gimme local gigs and top-gear grand tours.
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game …
Manchmal wissen wir nicht, welchem Einfluss wir unterliegen. Oder, dass unsere Kultur von anderen beeinflusst worden ist. Manchmal denken Europäer, sie wären nicht beeinflusst worden (deswegen die Illusionen von Leitkulturen und anderen Phantasien). Abgesehen von den offensichtlichen, arabischen, gibt es natürlich den Kolumbianischen Austausch, von dem Albrecht Dürer erfasst aber keinen Schimmer hatte.
Was wir daher sehr oft beobachten können, ist die Tatsache, dass Europäer sich als eingegrenzt ansehen. Ihre eigene Kultur fein säuberlich von den anderen unterschieden. Lediglich Wokeness Diskurse können uns Auskunft darüber geben, dass unsere ach so geliebte Kultur nicht alleine da steht. Dass sie auch von anderen Kulturen beeinflusst wurde. Und dass sie ein Ergebnis ist, ein dynamisches, dieser verschiedenen Einflüsse.
Das Bewusstsein der Eingrenzung funktioniert auch zeitlich. Wir sind überzeugt davon, dass das Jetzt für unsere Kultur wichtig ist. Vielleicht blicken wir auf die 70er Jahre des letzten Jahrhunderts. Ok. Auf die 60er. Aber selten weiter.
Wie gut Kultur durch Einflüsse, sowohl die vertikalen, die traditionellen als auch die horizontalen, die aus anderen Kulturen, funktionieren kann, wie gut sie klingt, können wir uns überzeugen, wenn wir nach Kyiv schauen. Von dort kommt die Band ДахаБраха, die verschieden Einflüsse, verschieden Eindrücke vereinigt. Und so zu einer kulturellen Avantgarde wird.
Doch hört selbst. Ihre Seite führt auch zu einzelnen Tracks (externer Link): https://www.dakhabrakha.com.ua
In the European tradition, there are rathe quite simple explanations for repetitions. On the one hand, we have this prehistorical theory. It means, repetitions are a part of nature (no matter how we are going to define the term nature), they show us comes and goes of seasons. But we cannot imagine repetitions during a fall. On the other hand, Derrida said, repetitions have the power to conjure up ghosts. It´s not magical. When I listen to a tape with someone’s voice, it is like I listen to a ghost. And it doesn’t play a role if he is dead or still alive. Beckett´s Crapp is listening to his own voice after years. He is listening to a ghost. Crapp is a ghost. Evoked by his own voice.
But it’s on us to feel the ghost. Probably Hölderlin did it while writing his poems. Maybe one of us does it while reading it. It always depends on us.
On the other side, there is another description. When we take sociology and Latour, repeats may tell us something about us. But what they will tell us? They will probably tell us a story about our theory of time. We already described it. The European civilization describes time as a line, as a phenomenon, which goes and never comes back. We use repeats as a possibility to compare ourselves with our previous culture. And mostly in order to speak about something like development. Maybe our understanding of time is the reason, why Europeans believe in something like development. A revolution is not a break of time but a point when we look back.
Im don’t mention structuralism, because this text is not a philosophical essay. Rather an invitation.
But there is something more. Viveiros de Castro says, anthropologists describe mostly themselves, not the other culture. When we look at a phenomenon like a repetition, we don´t look at nature. We rather look at ourselves. The question is, what we may see when we look at it? Maybe more than a repetition? Maybe we don´t see the difference between now and earlier? Maybe we can only see the repetition as time? As continuum.
When we listen to music by Lubomyr Melnyk, we find repetitions. And while listening to his music, may lose ourselves in the music, in time, in repetitions. And we may see not only time but also ghosts from the past. And maybe also us. Not as a ghost but as humans. And maybe we will find small differences. And will be happy about them.
You can listen to Melnyk here (external Youtube link):
https://youtu.be/W9x8sWQEY_w
©Zenvampires 2022