Stuff that went down today

Quick update and record of what went down today and plans going forward for us all:

1. RATIONALE

We began streamlining our extensive thoughts into a rationale, which went something like this:

"Happiness as a goal is widely functioning as a normative and atomising force, furthering and being used to further unexamined participation in capitalist lifestyles"

Not sure about 'lifestyles' myself - not full enough? Lifestyle is part of this but it is about the whole system - production and consumption. Us as participants in producing, consuming and reproducing..

We went on to break down themes/points within this, such as the objectification of happiness (as Will Davies talks about), the atomisation of the project as individual responsibility/opportunity (and failing if you don't manage to be happy - see pathologising of unhappiness, both Davies and Sara Ahmed talk about this), and normative function of happiness when happiness is embodied by certain lives, lifestyles and goods (which fit in with marketable hegemony).

Think Josh is doing a fuller version of this to post, so we can collaborate on bashing it out properly.

2. ANTI-VERT

Started collecting clips for our anti-vert. We are downloading these via keepvid.com (incredibly easy) and then saving on shared 'life a users manual' google drive so everyone not in London can have a look and add to.

3. TOMORROW
 
Pen-rage and interviews - 2 groups heading out, one to Peckham and other to Canary Wharf. We will split time pen-raging and also interview as wide a range of people as we can, poking around with our rationale.

%$*&^()(*)_)(_"$£&&~@:~

Finally, here's Guy Debord calling the Apple helpline, sort of. This is this home-made anti-slick vibe I like and think we could consider in our works (maybe as well as slick one..). It's quite amazing what the Apple guy starts saying at the end of the call, playing into the fetishisation of commodity point. Maybe we should make some calls for our anti-vert audio..

 

Penraged got me thinking...

So I was on my way to Euston last Friday and was immediately inundated with lots of ridiculous adverts on the underground. I would have started scribbling in the name of political intervention but it was very busy and the majority of the ridiculous ones were behind the tracks. Anyway, I saw this and it got me thinking about the relationship between the tyranny of happiness and the commodification of  empowerment. These are both rather well linked as it is through such commodification that the tyrannical nature of advertising can be fully grasped. In our meeting this week I was talking to Sari about the idea that a huge part of advertising, and where my immediate problem lies, is through how adverts take real joy from human interaction and suck all of the life from them in order to sell us stuff. I believe that is the real tyranny. In the case of feminism it's clear that we are sold faux empowerment in order to get us to buy things. It's so gross and manipulative. With the advert I saw in particular, it's like 'you're a superwoman but your legs are still fat so wear our shoes'. It really is completely ridiculous

This is a really great article about it:

https://qz.com/692535/we-sold-feminism-to-the-masses-and-now-it-means-nothing/

Wow. Check out this article. This man is the living consequence of all we are trying to resist. Living his life to make money - for 'security'. He is the machine.  He doesn't buy comfort, he just keeps accumulating because he doesn't seem to know anything different. Clearly, he has let human connection diminish.


http://nextshark.com/man-reveals-how-choosing-comfort-in-his-20s-led-to-a-life-of-emptiness-and-pain/

Yesterday I started reading 'anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, I highly recommend it. Foucault writes the preface and in it lists things to live counter to all forms of fascism (including the fascism within all our heads that "causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us").

Here are a few of his suggestions:

• Develop action, thought and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization
• Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power 
• Do not become enamoured of power

I think theres something here we can use for our rationale...

See you soon,

LC X

WE/YOU/I

Thoughts on the everyday politics of group work

If we must work to play this project is my kind of game - we discussed the idea of the 'i' vs the 'we' and it got me thinking about this project pertaining to the 'we'. We are within the individually driven educational system that pits us against one another, encouraging competition and providing society with individuals fit for a capitalist system.

Group work can take us away from that. Especially this group.

Your minds and thoughts are making me think. Hard. And I love it. Perhaps this is the alternate side of this vast project. This group has made me feel allllllll kinds of emotion; happy, inspired, angry, frustrated, motivated, challenged. The diversity of human emotion is worth celebrating, no one emotion is more valid or useful than the rest, they require each other to function.

You feel emotion individually, no one can comprehend the way someone feels completely. But sharing the memory of a moment or idea or creating a moment or an idea with an other is vital for human beings. We are social creatures. And our discussing emotional obsession is important, and an interesting paradox. To have to think about thinking about emotions in order to try and not prioritise thinking about emotions. Classic academia eh!

Adverts Around London

As a follow up to the idea of Brandalism, I found this!

We should definitely use this to post an huge advert, or adverts, around Goldsmiths and London. We could film people viewing the ad from afar. It is perhaps not legal but I'm prepared to take the risk for the sake of the project if you guys are? 

(Cick on the image to see it larger to view the text).

Sample Release Forms

Here's two sample release forms we can use for the interviews today, I'm not privy to the details of permission/copyright with this kinda stuff but these two detail what we can use the footage for:

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/Downloads/DUP_SampleInterviewRelease.pdf

 http://www.folklife.si.edu/resources/pdf/interviewreleaseform.pdf

Tailoring questions towards advertising

Super work on the questions Sari and Lucy, I particularly like the ones that zoom in on Happiness as an 'agenda': 

• Can you think of something you buy to alleviate discomfort? 
• Does it work? 
• Do you feel a pressure to be happy?
• Are you happy enough?

As we're looking at Happiness, a huge umbrella term, I think we should clarify where we think the pressure to be happy is coming from  - namely advertising.

Therefore our questions and overall vision for the project should reflect the tandem between pervasive, explicit advertising of happiness and it's failure to produce a real happiness. 

Asking people how advertising makes them feel is crucial, we're not just asking people about unhappiness or discomfort but about the methods and tactics that they encounter everyday. Focusing on advertising will help to narrow the line of questioning and analysis of the answers we receive from interviews. 

What do you guys think?