<nettime> A Tactical Blueprint - By Alexander Trocchi

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sigma: A Tactical Blueprint

By Alexander Trocchi (1963?)

It is our contention that, for many years now, a change, which might be
usefully regarded as evolutionary, has been taking place in the minds of
men; they have been becoming aware of the implications of
self-consciousness. And, here and there throughout the world, individuals
are more or less purposively concerned with evolving techniques to inspire
and sustain self-consciousness in all men [sic].

However imperfect, fragmentary, and inarticulate this new force may
presently appear, it is now in the process of becoming conscious of itself
in the sense that its individual components are beginning to recognize
their involvement and consciously to concern themselves with the technical
problems of mutual recognition and, ultimately, of concerted action.

History is [the history] of societies geared to and through their every
institution affirmative of the past, which tends, whatever its complexion,
to perpetuate itself. Thus there is a natural inertia in history.
Conventions, and the institutions which lend them authority, crystallize.
Change is resisted, particularly changes in ways of thinking. The change
which concerns us here was first explicit in modern science; the same
change has been announced for close on a century in modern art. A whole
new way of thinking became possible with the 20th century. Just as the
substantial, objective world was destroyed by modern science, so all
modern art has turned on the conventional object and destroyed it. Modern
art is expressive of the evolutionary change we are speaking about; modern
science furnishes us with the methods and techniques in terms of which we
can postulate and resolve the practical problems of adapting ourselves to
history in a new, conscious and creative way.

In looking for a word to designate a possible international association of
men who are concerned individually and in concert to articulate an
effective strategy and tactics for this cultural revolution (cf. The
Invisible Insurrection), it was thought necessary to find one which
provoked no obvious responses. We chose the word "sigma." Commonly used in
mathematical practice to designate all, the sum, the whole, it seemed to
fit very well with our notion that all men [sic] must eventually be
included.

In general, we prefer to use the word "sigma" with a small letter, as an
adjective rather than as a noun, for there already exists a considerable
number of individuals and groups whose ends, consciously or not, are near
as dammit identical with our own, groups which are already called X and Y
and Z and whose members may be somewhat reluctant to subsume their public
identities under any other name. If these groups could be persuaded of the
significance of linking themselves "adjectivally" to sigma, it would for
the present be enough. Moreover, in the foreseeable future, we may very
well judge it prudent to maintain multiple legal identities; doing so, we
may avoid provoking the more obvious kinds of resistance.

Actually dispersed as we are, and will be until several self-conscious
focal-points (sigma-centres) are established, effective communications are
vital. All individuals and groups the world over must be contacted and
henceforth invited to participate. People must be located and activated:
we are confronted with the technical problem of elaborating the ways of
gearing the power of all of us individuals to an effective flywheel. This
must be solved without requiring anyone to sink his identity in anything
noxiously metaphysical.

In The Invisible Insurrection we touched on the kind of situation we wish
to bring about. We conceived it to be a kind of spontaneous university.
But the term "university"  has some unfortunate connotations and is,
besides, too limited to include the entire complex of vital and infectious
human processes we have in mind to detonate, first in England and
subsequently throughout the world. The original spontaneous university (or
sigma-centre) will be a fountainhead only. We are concerned with cities
and civilizations, not with "classrooms" in the conventional sense,
nevertheless, we are at the beginning of it all and must commence with
certain practical considerations. Our experimental situation, our
international conference, must be located so that our "cosmonauts" can
either congregate or be in contact.

It is not simply a question of founding yet another publishing house, not
another art gallery, nor another theater group, and of sending it on its
high-minded way amongst the mammon-engines of its destruction. Such a firm
(I am thinking in terms of the West for the moment), if it were successful
in sustaining itself within the traditional cultural complex, would "do
much good," no doubt. But it is not the publishing industry alone that is
in our view out of joint (and has no survival potential); to think almost
exclusively in terms of publishing is to think in terms of yesterday's
abstractions. A softer bit and more resilient harness won't keep the old
nag out of the knackery. Of course sigma will publish. When we have
something to publish. And we shall do it effectively, forgetting no
technique evolved in yesterday's publishing. (Or we may find it convenient
to have this or that published by a traditional publisher.) But it is art
too in which we are interested. With the leisure of tomorrow in mind, it
is all the grids of expression we are concerned to seize.

That is what we mean when we say that "literature is dead";  not that some
people won't write (indeed, perhaps all people will), or even write a
novel (although we feel this category has about outlived its usefulness),
but the writing of anything in terms of capitalist economy, as an economic
act, with reference to economic limits, it is not, in our view,
interesting. It is business. It is a jungle talent. We also wish to paint
and we also wish to sing. We have to think of a society in which leisure
is a fact and in which a man's very survival will depend upon his ability
to cope with it.  The conventional spectator-creator dichotomy must be
broken down. The traditional "audience" must participate.

We might even say we don't know what we wish to do; we wish, rather,
continuously to consult with other intelligences on an international and
experimental basis. Amongst other things, we believe in the vital
importance of pamphlets and pamphleteering, but it is not that we shall
bring out 12 (the round dozen!) pamphlets on the 14th of September to
"launch" our imprint and proceed to send our private little ball spinning
along the well-worn grooves of the cultural pinball-machine: that would be
to invite the destruction of the intuition which drives us to articulate.
Nor can we limit ourselves, as far as printed matter is concerned, to the
traditional media. One interesting "publishing" project, for example,
would be to rent an advertisement panel in (say) four of the London
Underground stations for a trial period of one year, and to print our
weekly (or monthly)  magazine poster-size. Obviously, the weekly poster
could be placed in other spots as well. A broadsheet, personal size, could
be sent to sponsors and subscribers who might value a facsimile collection
of the posters. And why stop at London?  (Undergrounds of the World
Unite!) The editorial job in such a project would be complex but not
impractical. Thirty or forty writers sympathetic towards sigma could be
solicited in advance. Other conventional projects, which we shall discuss
in more detail later, are: advertising space in little magazines, in the
personal columns of national newspapers, all manner of labels, matchboxes,
etc., toilet paper (for the New Yorker reader who has everything),
cigarette cards, the backs of playing cards, etc., Of course, we shall
publish books as well: but the greater part of what we shall eventually
decide to do will grow out of the conflux of creative ideas and goodwill
that is sigma. To begin with, we must make a continuous, international,
experimental conference possible; a permanent meeting of minds to
articulate and promote the vast cultural change which U.N.E.S.C.O. is
prevented by its origins from effecting.

We must say to our sponsors: while we can envisage sigma's flourishing
economically in the West, it is not primarily a business organization. We
require a protected situation, a place to confer and corporately create. A
great deal has already been done. But our strength lies not so much in
what has so far been done purposively in our name [as] in the availibility
of other intelligences to our trans-categorical inspiration. All over the
world today are little conflagrations of intelligence, little pockets of
"situation-making." Some of the first theorists called themselves
"Situationnistes." Other individuals and groups who appear to us to have
similar attitudes are presently being gathered into a comprehensive index
which will serve as the basis for our communications. We have to evolve
the mechanisms and techniques for a kind of supercategorical cultural
organization. Some of its features we believe to be as follows:



(1) sigma as international index:

The first essential for those whose purpose it is to link mind with mind
in a supernatural (transcategorical) process, is some kind of efficient
expanding index, an international "who's who." It is a question of taking
stock, of surveying the variety of talent and goodwill at our disposal.
Who is with us? Who knows he [sic] is with us? Our general invitation
might read something like this:

We should like to invite you to take part in an international conference
about the future of things. The brief introductory statement enclosed (The
Invisible Insurrection) should give you an idea of what we are about.

We have chosen the word sigma because as a symbol it is free of bothersome
semantic accretions.

Actually dispersed as we are, and will be until several self-conscious
focal points are established (in each of which an experimental situation
is self-consciously in the process of articulating itself), effective
communications are vital.

Now and in the future our centre is everywhere, our circumference nowhere.
No one is in control. No one is excluded. A man [sic] will know when he is
participating without offering him a badge.

We have decided that as far as it is economically possible, you should
receive all our future informations. Sigma's publications are in general
given away free to those who participate in its activities.

The conference begins now and goes on indefinitely. We are particularly
anxious to have your participation soon, as soon as possible.

sigma associates

We are writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, physicists,
bio-chemists, philosophers, neurologists, engineers, and whatnots, of
every race and nationality. The catalogue of such a reservoir of talent,
intelligence, and power, is of itself a spur to our imagination.

(2) sigma as spontaneous university:

We can write off existing universities. These lately illustrious
institutions are almost hopelessly geared and sprocketted to the
cultural-economic axles of the status quo; they have become a function of
the context they came into being to inspire.

Of the American universities, Paul Goodman writes:  "Therefore we see the
paradox that, with so many centres of possible intellectual criticism and
intellectual initiative, there is so much inane conformity, and the
universities are little models of the Organized System itself." Secession,
the forming of new models: this is the traditional answer, and in our view
the only one. So Oxford broke away from the Sorbonne and Cambridge from
Oxford, and "the intellectual ferment was most vigorous, the teaching most
brilliant, the monopoly of the highest education most complete, almost
before a university existed at all" (Hastings Rashdall: The Universities
of Europe in the Middle Ages.) The bureaucracies of the universities mesh
with the bureaucracy of the state, mirror it in little; and the specific
disease of bureaucracy is that it tends to spawn more of itself and
function as a parasitic organism, inventing "needs" to justify its
existence, ultimately suffocating the host it was intended to nurture (cf.
the satire of William Burroughs). The universities have become factories
for the production of degreed technicians; the various governmental
reports on them (particularly the Robbins Report), skating over the thick
crust of centuries, call simply for more and more of the same.

The empty chapels of the Cambridge colleges are a significant symbol of
the decline of the parent institution.  Built originally to house the soul
of the community of scholars, they are presently derelict. Quite recently,
there was a newspaper report of a prize being offered to the student who
wrote the best essay on what should be done with them. It was awarded to
the student who suggested that they could be converted to laboratories for
science, dining halls and residential quarters for the students,
libraries, etc.  In short, what was once the vital spiritual centre was to
be turned over to material purposes; space is short, and imagination
shorter. That something immaterial, something intangible, has been lost,
was overlooked. There would have been more hope for Cambridge, certainly
more evidence of spirituality, if it had been decided to turn them into
brothels.

Meanwhile, those who (rightly or wrongly) are deeply distrustful of the
statistical method, clamouring for the abolition of college examinations,
tend to overlook the disastrous influence the examination-dominated
curriculum has upon the attitudes and habits of the student population at
our universities. The competitive system encourages the clever tactician,
the glib, the plausible. It is certainly painful and perhaps even
dangerous for a student to become deeply interested in his subject, or he
is constantly having to get ready to demonstrate his virtuosity; the
students at our universities are so busy practising appearances that one
seldom meets one who is concerned with the realities. The entire system is
a dangerous anarchronism. Secession by vital minds everywhere is the only
answer.

The more imaginative university teachers all over the world are well aware
of these things. But they can do nothing until they can see a possible
alternative. Sigma as spontaneous university is such an alternative. It
can only grow out of the combined effort of individuals and groups of
individuals working unofficially at [a] supernational level.  A large
country house, not too far from London (and Edinburgh, and New York, and
Paris, etc.), is being sought for the pilot project.

Those who saw the photographs of Lyn Chadwick's personal "museum" in the
color supplement of The Sunday Times some months ago, those who know
something of the Louisiana Foundation in Denmark, of the "semantic city"
at Canissy in France, about the cultural activities in Big Sur,
California, about Black Mountain College in North Carolina, about various
spontaneous cultural conglomerations in California and New York in the
late 'fifties, will have some idea of the vital significance of ambience.

While a great deal of lip-service is paid to the significance of a man's
environment (especially during the formative years), our societies push
ahead willy-nilly boxing people into honeycomb apartment blocks to meet
the immediate requirements of industry. For the moment, there is little we
can do about this, but we can take care that the structural features of
our sigma-centres are geared to and inspiring of the future as we imagine
it can be, rather than the past and present out of which men must evolve.
Our experimental sigma-centre must be in all its dimensions a model for
the functions of the future rather than of the past. Our architects,
arriving at the site with the first group of associates, will design the
architecture of the spontaneous university for and around the
participants.

The site should not be farther from London than Oxford or Cambridge, for
we must be located within striking distance of the metropolis, since many
of our undertakings will be in relation to cultural phenomena already
established there, and so that those coming from abroad can travel back
and forth from the capital without difficulty. Moreover, we have always
envisaged our experimental situation as a kind of shadow reality of the
future existing side by side with the present "establishment," and the
process as one of gradual "in(ex)filtration." If we were to locate
ourselves too far away from the centers of power, we should run the risk
of being regarded by some of those we are concerned to attract as a group
of utopian escapists, spiritual exiles, hellbent for Shangri-La on the
bicycle of our frustration. Then, "the original building will stand deep
within its own grounds, preferably on a riverbank. It should be large
enough for a pilot-group (astronauts of inner space) to situate itself,
orgasm and genius, and their tools and dream-machines and amazing
apparatus and appurtenances; with outhouses for workshops large as could
accommodate light industry, the entire site to allow for spontaneous
architecture and eventual town-planning," etc. (cf. The Invisible
Insurrection.)

Here our "experimental laboratory" will locate itself, our
community-as-art, and begin exploring the possible functions of a society
in which leisure is a dominant fact, and universal community, in which the
conventional assumptions about reality and the constraints which they
imply are no longer operative, in which art and life are no longer
divided. The "university," which we suspect will have much in common with
Joan Littlewood's "leisuredrome" (if she will forgive my coining a word),
will be operated by a "college"  of teacher-practioners with no separate
administration.

The cultural atrophy endemic in conventional universities must be
countered with an entirely new impulse. No pedagogical rearrangements, no
further proliferation of staff or equipment or buildings, nor even the
mere subtraction of administration of planning will help. What is
essential is a new conscious sense of community-as- art-of- living; the
experimental situation (laboratory) with its personnel is itself to be
regarded as an artifact, a continuous making, a creative process, a
community enacting itself in its individual members. Within our
hypothetical context, many traditional historical problems will be
recognized at once as artificial and contingent;  simultaneously we shall
realise our ability to outflank them by a new approach; and certain more
vital problems which today receive scant attention or none at all,
together with others which in a conventional context cannot even be
articulated, will be recognized as more appropriate to any possible future
of mankind on this planet.

We must choose our original associates widely from amongst the most
brilliant creative talents in the arts and sciences.

They will be men and women [hic!] who understand that one of the most
important achievements of the twentieth century is the widespread
recognition of the essentially relative nature of all languages, who
realise that most of our basic educational techniques have been inherited
from a past in which almost all men were ignorant of the limitations
inherent in any language. They will be men and women who are alive to the
fact that a child's first six years of schooling are still dedicated to
providing him with the emotional furniture imposed on his [sic] father
before him, and that from the beginning he is trained to respond in terms
of a neuro- linguistic system utterly inadequate to the real problems with
which he will have to contend in the modern world.

Our university must become a community of mind whose vital function is to
discover and articulate the functions of tomorrow, an association of free
men [sic] creating a fertile ambiance for new knowledge and understanding
(men who don't jump to the conclusion Kropotkin carried a bomb because he
was an anarchist), who will create an independent moral climate in which
the best of what is thought and imagined can flourish. The community which
is the university must become a living model for society at large.

(3) sigma as international cultural engineering cooperative:

(a) The international pipeline:

When sigma-centres exist near the capitals of many countries, associate
artists and scientists traveling abroad will be able to avail themselves
of all the facilities of the local centre. They may choose simply to
reside there or they may wish to participate. If the visitor is a
celebrity, it would probably be to his [sic] advantage to do any
"interview" work (audio or visual) in the sigma-centre where "angle" and
editing can be his own. Sigma will then handle negotiations with local
radio and television. The imaginative cultivation of this international
pipeline would be a real contribution to international understanding.

(b) Cultural promotion:

This field is too vast to be treated fully here. It includes all the
interesting cultural projects, conferences, international newspaper,
publishing ventures, film and television projects, etc., which have been
and will be suggested by associates during conferences. Many of these
ideas, realized efficiently, would make a great deal of money. All this
work would contribute to the sigma image.

(c) General cultural agents:

Some of the associates, especially the younger ones who are not previously
committed elsewhere, will be glad to be handled by sigma. Obviously, we
shall be in a position to recognize new talent long before the more
conventional agencies, and, as our primary aim will not be to make money,
we shall be able to cultivate a young talent, guarding the young person's
integrity.

(d) General cultural consultants:

The enormous pool of talent at our disposal places us in an incomparable
position vis-a-vis providing expert counsel on cultural matters. We can
advise on everything cultural, from producing a play to building a picture
collection. A propos the latter, one of our proposed services is to offer
an insurance policy to a buyer against the depreciation in value of any
work or art recommended by sigma. It may frequently be advisable,
economically or otherwise, for sigma to encourage some established company
to undertake this or that cultural project: that is to say, sigma will not
necessarily wait passively to be consulted. (Obviously, ideas ripe for
commercial exploitation cannot be made public in this context.)

CONCLUSION

Perhaps the most striking example of the wrong-headed attitude towards art
in official places is provided by the recent scuffle to keep the
well-known Leonardo cartoon from leaving the United Kingdom. The official
attitude has more in common with stamp-collecting than with aesthetics.
The famous cartoon could have sold abroad for around one million pounds.
For a small fraction of that sum, perfect replicas of it could have been
made and distributed to every art gallery in the country. It is small
wonder that the man in the street has such a confused attitude towards
art. This confusion of value with money has infected everything. The
conventional categories distinguishing the arts from each other, tending
as they do to perpetuate the profitable institutions which have grown up
around them, can for the moment only get in the way of creativity and our
understanding of it.

The basic shift in attitude described in the foregoing pages must happen.
IT IS HAPPENING. Our problem is to make men [sic] conscious of the fact,
and to inspire them to participate in it. Man must seize control of his
own future:  only by doing so can he ever hope to inherit the earth.



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