The Unstitute (2012)

The Unstitute is a series of makeshift architectural sites which follow the movements of its labourers. Each movement produces a series, each series proliferates into extensions and entrances, holes and dead-ends, annexes and chambers; sequential sectional additions. The series provides the desired movement – never singular, absolute, permanent, profound – always plural, temporary, mobile, superficial.

Full Description

Manifesto #2: On Method

To issue a manifesto – to make one’s aims sensible to others. Like an oath, published, one must be faithful to it or suffer the branding ‘disingenuous’. But genuine sentiment is the empty air of inward ressentiment. That is not ‘why one expresses’ intent. ‘Expressing intent’ has its own value, and its object, well, the object is often nothing more than justification for the expression. Were the attempt a failure, the expression still carries the mark of its own success [in being expressed]. It hardly sounds sensible to say one acts, not to achieve some end, but to act for-itself.

“A minor, or revolutionary, literature begins by expressing itself and doesn't conceptualize until afterward...”

Branding. Like the individual animals in a herd are branded, marked, to indelibly signify the owner, thus does the major literature of the status-quo conceptualize before expression. To express before conceptualizing appears abominable, unjust, unsound. The word of the proprietor must be stamped, assurances must be given, theft is always criminal, the law upholds conceptual branding. A major literature exists under the law and the word of the law.

‘...begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualize until afterward...’?

A minor literature is a discharge of force that is not discharged ‘by conceptualizing’. A minor literature has its potency ‘by expressing itself’ and only relaxes its power ‘afterward’. Conceptualizing the form of that force before the force is exerted stamps the letter of the law on it; it’s revolutionary force is diminished, the chance of its being acted becomes uncertain, untenable even, it becomes an idea of an action, it belongs to the master discourse. It has been mastered, or conceptualized, before its enacting so as to prevent is enacting.

A minor literature seeks only its expression, for being minor, expression has no guarantor, no sanction. A stifled voice, it sounds coarse, lacks refinement, attracts scorn, but no matter. It overcomes oppressive silence, happy to die in being born.

Work metadata

  • Year Created: 2012
  • Submitted to ArtBase: Monday Feb 6th, 2012
  • Original Url: http://www.theunstitute.org/
  • Work Credits:
    • TheUnstitute, primary creator
  • Collective: The Unstitute supports four annual artists' residencies. Previous residents were Lucky Yamada and Adam Smith. Current resident is AAS.
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Artist Statement

The Second Three-Year Plan (2011-2014)

  1. Thought, Speech, Text

1.1 Positive promotion of paranoid processes

1.2 The production of rhetoric contradicting altruistic philosophy

1.3 Speaking and the terminology of freedom

1.4 Bad-Faith and the destruction of obligation, regret and laisez-faire

1.5 Creation of self-interest, recovery of ‘selfishness’ as positive attribute

1.6 Naming, re-naming, un-naming and anti-naming; studies in Bad-Faith

  1. Passivity, Reactivity, Activity

2.1 Combat against Ressentiment in psychological economy

2.2 Reevaluation of energy discharge/reducing need for purpose

2.3 The role of negation in personality

2.4 Problems of archival memory systems/architectures

2.5 Experiments into Radical Insecurity for promotion of reactivity (against Care)

2.6 Investigation of Repercussion and Oblivion Of Action (On What Remains)

2.7 Understanding as a function of participation, not spectatorship

2.8 Consequence not a property of forethought

2.9 The division of labour in the manufacture of Pain (Ressentiment / the ‘dark workshop’)

  1. Resistance, Force, Vector

3.1 Creation of political avenues [flows] and objections [resistances]

3.2 Thinking as activity (participation), not as discharge i.e. returning to baseline

3.3 Discovery of what energy discharge can do, not what it is for

3.4 The geography of individuality and its potential

3.5 Discovery/creation of limitations (non-reliance on/trust of accepted definitions)

3.6 Strategic uses of contempt

3.7 Affirmation of differential power / against the equalisation of opposing force

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