Walking Out On The Spectacle

The Voyage of Donald Crowhurst This is one of the central myths of mythogeography. Crowhurst left Teignmouth in Devon, UK, in 1968 on a double journey. One, from a to a, a round-the-world yacht race, The Sunday Times Golden Globe Race; the other, triggered by his failure to leave the Atlantic and the necessary deceptions that kept him in a race he had to win, led him first into moral, and then in his own mind into physical, relativity. He began to embody Einstein’s Special Theory. He became a living Gedankenexperiment. Crowhurst’s story is one of few modern tragic individuals; for his predicament is partly one of his own making; there is hubris, but there is also heroism. And he is an example to mythogeographers, not in some sick, ironical way, but as someone who, when he lied, was released to genuinely live an impossible physics. Faced with victory, he (probably) picked up his boat’s chronometer and stepped into the ocean. His sacrifice allows us to experiment without self-destruction. He took the chance; today, thanks to him, we don’t have to. City “I put on shows for policemen. Always the same routine… They were like sheep. They

always fell for it. I got myself picked up by one of them. To pay for my English. I know how you’re going to feel about this… But I did it for the English language, OK! When we were doing it I thought about the others. Everyone thinks of someone else when they come. Because coming isn’t in time. That’s why coming in the movies is samey. Coming isn’t part of history. Coming happens in a different time zone. Hong Kong ain’t six hours ahead of London. Munich ain’t one hour behind Paris. Anyway, it’s only cheating if you think of one bloke. It’s OK if it’s millions. That’s obviously not possible. All those made up stories in the newspapers. When they say so and so and so and so really did it in that scene, that’s just to sell the movie. All this phantom loving is going on. I feel like I shagged a whole city!! I feel really tired.” “Confessions of a Perfume Paratrooper” from Slippery Suitcases Spectacle The Spectacle is not a ‘curtain of illusion’ draped across reality, hiding the ‘real evils’ of capitalism.

In Howard Brenton’s play ‘Magnificence’ one of the characters tells a story about a drunk throwing a bottle through a cinema screen, as a metaphor for piercing the Spectacle (the hole remains as the action moves on). However, such piercing has been a devotional tactic since the pyramids: an “obelisk” (or more correctly a “tekhen”, from the ancient Egyptian verb “to pierce”) punctures the sky, the home of the gods. The Spectacle – despite the name – does not describe the distraction of people from the ‘truth’ of their circumstances through the deployment of Hollywood. Rather, it is a critique of the relations between people driven by the production and exchange of images, accelerated by a culture of visuality in which the image has replaced the commodity as the main object of desire. Simple, really, and yet it is ‘odd’ how many clever people get it wrong. Makes you wonder about their motives… (anyone can win an argument if they can define their opponent’s terms for them).

There is nothing ethereal or mystical about the operations of the Spectacle. They are the same relations of consumption as those of spectral finance capital with its addictive relationship to de-centred banking, out-sourcing and the general hollowing out of every available institution and organisation. Walking out on the Spectacle has nothing (yet) to do with hope. It is about being paranoid and ready. Learning to be cockroaches. Learning to create theatre in cracks in the pavement, parliaments in back rooms. Acting the post-holocaust now. Stranger We need to learn an ethics of the stranger. How to receive a stranger, but also how to be and present ourselves as a stranger.