The View from the Sewers
Yesterday I came across a potential source of confusion in an author’s use of the term ‘underground cell’ and was compelled to google ‘underground’ again. Wakefield is a relatively mainstream commercial publishing house, so the contrast was pointed when I realised how immersed I am in the underground right now, as The Academy approaches.
I always thought the underground was territory populated by far more progressive, radical, counter-cultural types than I. All this time I’d been looking for it, wondering where it was, but I’m realising you don’t find it so much as make it. You’ve gotta make it, which is a really fun and amazing prospect, making things here in the sewers of culture.
The beauty of it is that it’s easy to ‘make it’ here, because we set our own terms of success. We applaud each other and offer each other tiny nodes of validation, which connect up to make a web of successful cultural practice. And when this web grows strong enough, we are able to jump up and down on it, yelling at the people up on the street, telling them how awesome this or that book or whatever is, and eventually they’ll hear us AND listen to us, so instead of them having to come DOWN to us or us having to go UP to them, it’s the sewers that will move – the terms of cultural expression will shift and humanity will just go on drifting along in the detritus. Effluent?
That doesn’t make a lot of sense.
It just means that WE (us AND them) create AND consume culture, and these acts are what shift our understanding of each other. Eventually our differences will merge into one great big vibrating body of compassion and the sex will be amazing and we’ll all look after each others’ babies and there won’t be bombs or any of that shit.
You may not realise it Ryan, but you are displaying Anarchist Tendencies in this post…
*gulps*
You mean the bit about looking after each others’ babies or fucking with the sewer system? I think I’ve been resisting this label in the same way I resisted ‘insomniac’. It’s a slippery slope. But I guess the way I bang on about antagonising and manipulating the institutions/infrastructure/mechanisms that govern our literary culture is suggestive of anarchist tendencies, but don’t anarchists all want to just blow shit up? Actually, I WOULD like to put a bomb under Australia Council. You got flint?
When you boil it down and trim back the fatty bits, “Anarchism” is really just about the rejection of all forms of hierarchical authority, especially coercive authority . Its about Mutual Aid. Its Self-Managed societies.
An – NO – Archy – KINGS – NO GODS NO MASTERS – NO BORDERS NO NATIONS… etc etc
I’m glad you’ve brought my attention to this Allan, because there I was thinking anarchists were a bunch of ill-informed, pyromaniacal punks, which is more like what I am anyway (hence my initial resistance to the term), but I’m also very much interested in “the rejection of all forms of hierarchical authority”.
The institutions I hope we can manipulate in literary culture may not be coercive, but their passive resistance to change is equally corrosive to all the goodness that could emerge from this underground we run around in. I like the idea of self-managed culture, and the rejection of top-down culture that is inherent in that. Or something – I think I’m just repeating variations on the same ideas now.
But I love it when a label drifts my way that helps me understand what the fuck I’m doing with all these ideas and ambitions, so, cheers. CLINK. (IRL on Sunday – or Saturday if you make it to the potluck.)