COMPACTS OF CHAOS:
THE CREDIBILITY SCALE OF REIFIED DISSENT

The new groups are not concerned

With what there is to be learned

They got Burton suits, ha you think it's funny,
Turning rebellion into money.
— “White Man In Hammersmith Palais”
Joe Strummer, The Clash



[There is absolutely no logical basis for the choice of colors or proportions of this graph].

I am interested in what happens when the language of political/social dissidence gets commercialized/made marketable/sellable/profitable. This reification is deeply problematic—and totally hilarious. As shown below in a Converse sneaker:

In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Gajo Petrović defines reification as “The act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man‑produced things which have become independent… Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modern capitalist society.”(i) My work concerns itself with this movement from concept to symbol, of an object injected with attitude, the creation of an independent existence that has a new and perhaps fantastically misconceived meaning.

While Anarchyclothing.net sells a “Taste of Chaos” beanie (which I have purchased for $24.95), the publishing house Autonomedia distributes “The Calendar of Jubilee Saints,” a cyclical recount of the birthday’s of some 365 radicals. So, this is just a food chain then? If Hakim Bey’s The T.A.Z. (ii) is the all-knowing and illustrious top dog of rarified anarchy, then Adbusters and Hot Topic follow a trickle down effect of increasingly debased ideological intention, coagulating into a symbol of black-and-red cartoon derision. But to light the legitimacy spectrum is to reveal the intricacy of anarchy’s lattice; a weave of equal debasement, where the credibility gaps are tightened by the polarity of its very own threads.

After all, the System has been up to no good for a while, and there are many shades of plaid. To merchandise a “rebellious good” is to drop it like a suicide bomb; it lands in what it tries to admonish. So if participation is perpetuation, answer this cuntish question(iii): is it all just recuperation? According to Church of the SubGenius founder Bob Black, “To turn the system's images against it was to detourn, to divert them. But to be ‘turned’ in turn—in the argot of the intelligence community—was to be recuperated, recovered by the system as art, as ideology, as any of many fragmentary forms of specialization or partial opposition.”(iv) Because no matter the standing or source, every radical idea blister-wrapped, is still a radical idea blister-wrapped.

This is the product of being angry behind bars.

And the results aren’t half bad. A T-shirt that reads: “Daddy’s Little Anarchist Girl” sells for $21.99 (bumper sticker just $3.99) on STOP FASCISM!’s online store. It is in Green Day’s 2004 album American Idiot. It is a poster of Ashlee Simpson sexily flagging the . And it is Adbusters founder Kalle Lasn’s new book Design Anarchy(v), purportedly “the graphic designer’s revolutionary handbook.” How fantastic. Not only does it acknowledge that there is indeed a hidden framework to the aesthetics of dissent, it reveals that it is planned and sold. So chaos has a pattern. And an accountant.

My work proposes that while there are varying degrees of dissidence, commodification is essential to all. False Nails (The Black Hand Collection) has seventy-five fake nails, each one a marker on the credibility scale of reified dissent. They are arranged using the manicurist’s nail display format, which derogates subjectivity in favor of equality, but not, it must be noted, neutrality. In the same place for the first time, Kathy Acker and Avril Lavigne have a conversation. The nails propose that “high end” dissidence is as equally debased as its commercialized frogspawn; the aesthetics of rebellion are very obvious—it’s all fashion baby.

Fake nails have always been alarmingly important to me. In high school, lunchtime meant a euphoric trek through the Korean manicure salons of Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall. Each week a new message on my nails, each week the very act a mischievous dedication. To match her pet iguana Helmut, Lena had her pinky painted lime green with sparkles. Because he could never afford the real stuff, Gabriel decked his thumbs with silver interlocking Chanel c’s. While my ninety-four year old grandmother shrieked in horror, “Those claws! Why do you wear those claws!” they are still my plastic chip manifestos, my Morse code of rebellion.

While historically long nails were a signifier of the work exempt elite, today they often do just the opposite. The most bedazzled of talons are more likely grazing a supermarket cash register than flipping through the pages of Martha Stewart’s Living. Nail length is no longer a sign of the negation of manual labor; each fingertip is crowned in honor of the category itself. Affirmative abjection is a sassy move, and its money in anarchy’s bank. Wearing fake nails can be so disobedient.
False Nails should be simultaneously sold at Hot Topic and ordered through Semiotext(e). They should be situated at the very helm they explore, available to all the varying creeds of anti-this-establishment. They are logos of logos, insignias of ideas, small paintings of tropicalismo and class redemption branded onto an already charged fashion accessory.

As with the manicurist’s nail board, The Display Rack of Recuperated Anarchy presents information in a consumer-ready/consumer-friendly format. Like Madam’s “I want” directional lines (above), this unit’s structure suggests that flipping is shopping, and presupposes that by proximity and comparison, at least one item will satiate the rabid shopper’s need to buy.

Images for both nails and posters run the anarchy gamut. From The Cacophony Society(vi) to Fall Out Boy, from ®™ark’s Working Tactics poster series(vii) to The Nightmare Before Christmas, the recuperation of radical thought into safe commodity is presented side by side as what it is; rebellion made of money.

ENDNOTES

(i) Gajo Petrović, Reification. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. pp. 411-413

(ii) Bey, Hakim. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003.

(iii) When asked to explain Situationism, Guy Debord huffed, “We’re not here to answer cuntish questions!” Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1961.

(iv) Bob Black, The Realization and Suppression of Situationism, The Journal of Unconventional History, 1994. Viewed online at Spunk.org (Quick autobio: “The Spunk Library collects and distributes literature in electronic format, with an emphasis on anarchism and related issues. For a more complete description of what Spunk is about you can view the Spunk Manifesto.”)

(v) Lasn, Kalle. Design Anarchy. New York: ORO Editions/Adbusters Indy Books, 2006.

(vi) “The Cacophony Society is a randomly gathered network of individuals united in the pursuit of experiences beyond the pale of mainstream society through subversion, pranks, art, fringe explorations and meaningless madness.” (www.cacophony.org)

(vii) ®™ark is an amazing collective; now more of an archive as they have not had much web activity since Bush II’s first term. (www.rtmark.com)

Greil, Marcus. Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. (Questionable dude. The Barbelith Webzine sizes him down nicely: “What the punk rock connection actually represents is the recuperation of Situationist theory, using it to sell bondage trousers, seven inch singles and tiresome pseudo-academic theories like those of Greil Marcus.” From Situtaionism in a Nutshell, written June 1, 2001. www.barbelith.com)