LOUCHE OPS                                                       

Against Erection

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Much of George Bataille's writing was aimed at beheading the governing moral logic of his day and its regulation of human experience. Acephala, the headless symbolic figure that he and his associates took as a symbol for activity, indicated something other than a desire to replace one state with another.

It's significant to consider that in his youth, Bataille was once a member of a Benedictine seminary and then studied to become a librarian with a focus on Medieval texts. Churches and academy libraries may seem like strange breeding grounds for anarchists, but it's less a coincidence and more of a model of the displacements he was pointed against. Many of the most prolific arsonists learned their craft while working as firefighters.

Traditions hoping to elude politically imposed determination, have often found their inspiration in ruins. But over centuries, the recipe of divorce to escape the bondage of historical logic has cumulatively forged its own kind of bizarre, nostalgic conservatism. Romantic architecture ought to be a contradiction, but is not. An umbilical cord can only be cut once before the gesture becomes metaphorical.

Authoritarianism recoils from any premise that threatens its ability to recall the syntax of whichever two to three mantras form its moral facade. But even with so little to remember it still projects a constant fear of forgetting. Gore Vidal once said that the A in USA, stood for amnesia. 

While conservatively hostile towards critical thinking, fascism often gravitates towards new technologies in order to erect and enforce structures that offer the least possible space for alternative phrasings. Its core formal and ethical obsessions manifest as architecture, as in the erection of structure (concrete or legislative), and then in the clerical upkeep of those structures. The bureaucratic management of a systems imprint on its subjects, can be gauged not only by how subjects consciously internalize it, but also by what has been displaced from them. What the subjects externalize in response to their inevitable anatomical and psychological conformities, may also display what they have internalized unconsciously. 

Arguably, a psychotic break isn't necessarily a fracture from reality so much as a hyper-literal identification with architecture. If one is adverse to the illustrative bureaucracy of data, perhaps the performative mimicry of a psychotic break is the closest way that one can convincingly "draw from life". It's a perverse, if familiar, scenario to feel driven to be adopted by a structure that one would rather see demolished.

- James Krone

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