Violence of Heaven [ 1 ]

I opened the first post with the story of Christiania – a ‘micro-nation’ in the centre of Copenhagen that has been going since the early 1970s. Seen as a ‘social experiment’ by the generally left-leaning governments of Denmark, it is now under increasing threat from more right-wing administrations, as set out in Porter Fox’s excellent article ‘The Normalisation of Free Town.’

In Tuckman’s stages of group development, a team goes through stages of ‘Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing.’ The forming element is generally straightforward – people gather around a passion or desire and propose what they would like to do with their energies. In one sense, this happens pretty ‘naturally’ and may require little input. Following on from that, the storming element is essentially the easiest: the walls are torn down, the people march because of shared passion against something. Storming is generally about revolution – putting group energy into turning something round.

All utopias by definition get to this point. They form, they storm… but what happens next once they have turned over what they set out to oppose governs whether they will be a success or failure. Certainly, there is usually a lot of left-over energy and camaraderie from the ‘storming’ – and Christianians were no slackers, undertaking large infrastructural works and creating innovative social structures too.

I want to propose that for Christiania and any other utopia – even if the revolution is peaceful, the ‘norming’ element brings with it an element of ongoing violence. Why? Because once a pure space has been stormed and won – in this case the opening up of a disused military barracks – and once the initial fervour of creating a new space within which to exist has run out, what is left is the ‘norming’ of how to then simply live within this new space. People need to know what the new rules are, even if that means there are apparently no rules spoken.

In the case of Christiania, the battles began pretty quickly over who should have control over who lived where. Despite this being a place where there was meant to be no property ownership, people wanted to be able to put their own friends into vacant houses when they came up, and this led to fights and evictions.

These internal struggles are one aspect, but the most violent move has to come from defending the new space which has been stormed, and the pitch battles around the perimeter of Christiania that have been fought recently (see photo above) are a prime example of this.

Another example could include the storming of the Waco complex, and Christiania is no different to any other utopian movement that seeks to create a permanent new, purified space. Once these sorts of utopian spaces have been formed and stormed, they have two options to sustain their purity: defend their boundaries and stop dirt getting in, or continue to expand their boundaries and purify the space surrounding them. It’s to these two options we’ll turn in the next post.

As promised yesterday, a post about a brilliant piece by Porter Fox in this month’s Believer about the micro-nation ‘Christiania.’

Christiania began when a group of Danes broke down fences to a long-abandoned military base in the centre of Copenhagen and started to use some of the space as a playground for their children. Covering some 85 acres, Free Town – as it is known to Christianians – soon turned into a government-tolerated ‘social experiment’, where property could not be owned, and no cars or guns were allowed. Being a) Danish and b) of hippy roots, drugs were for a long time freely available on ‘Pusher Street’; hard drugs were not tolerated though, and Christianian’s own methods for rehab proved hugely successful.

Christiania is a real-life experiment in utopia, and what makes it fascinating is that it is now around 40 years old. So how has it faired? Fox’s article is entitled ‘The Normalization of Free Town’ and it is this process of ‘norming’ that I think is fascinating – and also has some very interesting parallels for all utopian visions – heaven included.

What I want to argue over a couple of posts – and do in ‘Other‘ is that if utopian ideal is pushed towards permanence, it inherently leads to violence – and this is precisely what has happened as Christiania has come under pressure from a more right-wing government in Denmark.

As Fox notes in the introduction to his article:

It was with some surprise that Danes turned on their television sets on May 14, 2007, to see fires burning in their capital’s streets and gangs of police officers beating their countrymen with billy clubs. The worst of the fighting flared up along Prinsessegade Road in the Christianshavn neighborhood. A column of black transport vans filed into the street as residents hurled Molotov cocktails, rocks, and fireworks at police. Officers retaliated with batons and tear gas, and by that afternoon, the seventeenth-century streets had disappeared under a thick cloud of smoke.

The site was an ironic flashpoint for violence. Prinsessegade Road marks the northern border of a pacifist commune that has existed in Christianshavn since 1971. That year, a group of squatters overtook an abandoned army base east of Prinsessegade, barricaded the roads, outlawed cars and guns, and created a self-ruling micro-nation in the heart of Copenhagen. They called the eighty-five-acre district Christiania Free Town, drew up a constitution, printed their own currency, banished property ownership, legalized marijuana, and essentially seceded from Denmark. The traditionally liberal Danish government allowed the settlement at first, dubbing Christiania a “social experiment.” Then it spent the next three decades trying to reclaim the area. Thirty-nine years and a dozen eviction notices later, the nine hundred residents of Free Town represent one of the longest-lasting social experiments in modern history.

How did a pacifist community come to this? And, from our own tradition, how did Christianity come to represent the face of some of the worst violence in Western history? I’ll be trying to explore some of that in the next couple of posts, drawing in some more excerpts from ‘Other’ along the way.

His Stuff I’ve Been Reading column in The Believer each month was a genuine highlight. Always funny, always erudite, always an inspiration to get out and read totally off-radar stuff. So when he stopped writing it a while back to focus on some longer projects, I was bereft. But he’s back. Last month I was too aghast and overjoyed to mention it, but this month’s column (June 2010 – sorry, no freebie you web cheapskates is pure joy, and contains a poem he constructed from one answer to a ‘Mass Observation‘ questionnaire on attitudes to spirituality in 1940′s Britain:

THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

Now you’ve caught me.
I’ve no idea

My life’s all work
And having babies.

Well, i think we’re all cogs
Of one big machine.

What I’m wondering is,
What is the machine for?

That’s your query.

Perfect. Subscribe now. I’ll personally guarantee satisfaction (and be blogging about a brilliant article on TAZ and utopias tomorrow.)

In the previous post I blogged about a fascinating book review in The Believer in which the reviewer was given just the text – no author, no past publications list, no endorsements and no well-designed cover. The text had to literally speak for itself, and, as someone who is about to be published again, I know I have conflicted opinions about this.

I think this has something to say to us about ‘bible-believing’ belief too. On Monday I had lunch with a colleague and fell to talking about a programme on the previous night which had looked at creation. My colleague (a warm atheist) was telling me about two friends who both believed that the Genesis creation narrative was literally true.

My thought was this: it was not that they had read Genesis and decided on the basis of the evidence that it was literally true, rather they simply couldn’t countenance the prospect of it not being literally true, as the problems of interpretation that this would precipitate would be too big. ‘It’s a matter of faith,’ one would repeatedly say. ‘I know it seems crazy, but I just have to believe it.’

In other words, for many ‘bible-believing’ Christians the irony is this: their belief that the bible is all literally true means that it has to be gagged. Why? Because if it were actually allowed to speak, it would cause too many problems.

If we were to simply read the text, without the ‘binding’ of the stern voices that tell us we can’t doubt, without the hard covers that brow-beat us with concerns that we are back-sliders if we don’t believe it all, we might find – as the reviewer did with their text – that when the word is allowed to speak, we can be renewed.

This month’s issue of The Believer is one of the best for some time, and carries one of the most interesting book reviews I’ve read for ages.

The book being reviewed is Momus’ Book of Jokes, but what makes the review so interesting is that the reviewer was given no information about the book at all, simply the text:

Its covers, front matter, and endpages had all been stripped, and the spine blacked out with a Sharpie. I didn’t know what it was called or who wrote it or who was publishing it or when. I didn’t know if it was the author’s first or twenty-first publication. Fiction? Nonfiction? Genre? Self-published? I didn’t know anything (and at this writing, I still don’t) except that it wasn’t poetry. What could I do? I began to read.

As the reviewer notes, it’s incredible what subtle information we pick up from a book cover, from endorsements, from the quality of paper or type used. And it’s amazing how much differently we read a book when we know the author who has written it – we either trust them or desperately want them to be as good as their last book.

In other words, most reviews are bullshit, and this is perhaps the only honest and true way that a book can really be judged: stripped naked and read without prejudice.

Yet I battle against this too, and with my new book coming am already involved in a campaign to gain readers’ attentions with discussions about the cover, and requests for endorsements. I want people to read the text, and the rest to disappear, and yet know that this is impossible, and, for the most part, unwanted.

The text can never speak for itself. We won’t let it. And this is the fallicy of ‘bible believing belief’ that I want to look at in another post.

(Pic is a mock-up of the cover for the book – not quite right text yet, but liking the concept a lot)

Been digging through a few old posts recently and came across something I’d written nearly 4 years ago now which I thought I’d give another airing – all about digital art and the ‘end of the original.’ Check the source code for the link at the end of the post. Just love it.

It reminded my of a fantastic piece on video games in the ever-fabulous Believer Magazine. In it, video game journalist Heather Chaplin notes:

‘Video games are good at fostering problem solving, but they’re not so good at fostering human empathy or a deeper understanding of the human condition.’

She continues:

‘Novels are about psychological empathy; games simply are not. And if games are telepathing something about the future, maybe that tells us something about the future, maybe that tells us that psychological empathy, concern with the human condition is not going to be that important in the twenty-first century.’

This is clearly problematic.

In an interview with The Believer magazine, which has yet to pop through my door annoyingly, Thom York has commented that Radiohead will probably not release another album. His reason? Making albums has ‘just become a real drag,’ and ‘none of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again.’

As The Guardian comments,

‘The problem isn’t the format – “obviously, there’s still something great about the album,” Yorke said – but with the scale and consistency of vision that is required.’

Instead, they’ll be going for shorter forms – like the EP of orchestral works they are planning – which allow them to ‘get stuck into it for a bit and see how it feels.’

I don’t blame them, or want to mourn their lack of vision or fake some Radiohead selling-out grief. But I do find this worrying in the broader vista of the arts. Scale and consistency of vision does require a huge investment of time and energy. But if people are simply not willing to invest this sort of energy then I think we will become a poorer society for it. OK Computer, Sergeant Pepper, 100 Years of Solitude… All of these are long form pieces that required huge time and effort from their creators, and unless people are prepared to make the sort of commitment to spend time creating, honing and editing them, then we simply won’t see the long form any more.

Short stories and blogs, but no novels.

EPs, but no albums.

Single canvases, but no series of works.

When the long form becomes a real drag, we are a culture in trouble. If we are only prepared to risk enough to ‘get stuck in for a bit and see how it feels’ I worry that we are going to lose the determined artistic vision that is the way ahead to newness. You know what Thom,

You ask me where the hell I’m going at thousand feet per second?
Hey man, slow down, slow down, idiot slow down, slow down…

Slow down, don’t worry about iTunes and the way the rest of music is going at crazy speeds. Take time create something of substance.