Official
Document
Title: The New York Declaration: Joint
Statement on Inauthenticity
Type: Press briefing
Authorised: Chief of Propaganda, First
Committee, INS
Authorisation Code: AA041207
New York, 25
September 2007
The Joint Statement presented by INS
Chief Philosopher Simon
Critchley and
INS founder and General Secretary Tom
McCarthy advanced inauthenticity as the
central tenet of INS doctrine, with a
compelling critique of the notion of
authenticity in art, literature, philosophy
and politics.
The aim of this briefing
is to summarise the main points of the
declaration in anticipation of the release
of the official transcript. Readers are
advised that unauthorised
recordings and transcripts now circulating in the
Internet cannot be authenticated and
may be unreliable.
Some 200 members of
the press and public who gathered at
the Drawing Center in New York’s
SoHo district to hear the Statement were
greeted by INS security staff and by
INS Chief of Propaganda, Anthony Auerbach.
Members of the press received a briefing summarising key events and interventions
in the history of the organisation (now
available online).
Without
much preamble, the INS General Secretary
and Chief Philosopher, seated at a table
on a low podium, proceeded alternately
to read a series of numbered theses on
inauthenticity.
They started out with
the failure of transcendence and the
copies of this failure which are recorded
in the history of art, philosophy and
literature.
They identified, on the one
hand, the slippery slope on which one
slides upwards towards “essence” and “ideal”,
a well-worn path for the tourists of
the sublime looking for a glimpse of
themselves “shattering
themselves against death” as Heidegger
(14) would fancy, or taking a swan-dive
into the volcano like Empedocles (19).
On the other hand, the statement identified
a more resistant slope which Bataille
called “l’informe” — the
formless which opposes the Platonic world
of forms, a universe that “‘resembles
nothing’ and ‘gets itself
squashed everywhere, like a spider or
earthworm’” (10).
All art
and literature is divided between these
two temptations: either to extinguish
matter and elevate it into form or to
let matter matter by making form as formless
as possible. The INS delivers itself
solidly to the second temptation: to
let matter matter, to let form touch
absence, ellipsis and debris (8).
The
INS Chief Philosopher and General Secretary
explained that what matters for the INS
are “not the imperial dreams in
the head of the polar explorer Ernest
Shackleton but rather his blackened,
frostbitten toes which, after the white
space into which he’d ventured
and on which he hoped to write his name
solidified and crushed his boat, he and
his crew were forced to chop from their
own feet, cook on their stove and eat.
Necronauts are poets of the antipodes
of poetry, artists of art’s
polar opposite, its Antartica” (9).
The
Statement declared the death of tragedy
in which the lonely hero, in death, is
rewarded with authentic being. Instead
they called for the comic, the divided
and the repetitive: instead of Oedipus,
Wile E. Coyote who, like a true necronaut, “dies
almost without noticing” (19),
again and again, repeatedly.
The Statment
navigated a course from the individual,
to the dividual (11), thence to the residual, “a
remainder that remains: a shard, a leftover,
a trace” (33),
and further to the risidual, a laughable
doubling. “What distinguishes the
poet or philosopher from others,” the
Statement said, “is that he can
laugh at himself. That is, he can simultaneously
be the one who trips and the one who
watches the trip: he can split himself
in two — what
Baudelaire calls dédoublement” (17).
All
cults of authenticity, it was declared,
whether they celebrate it in the guise
of transcendence, unity or totality,
for aesthetic, religious or political
ends, “should
be abandoned” (12).
The aim of the
declaration was not contemplation. It
was to stuff inauthenticity into our
mouths like Molly Bloom’s seed
cake, and thus with a silent “yes” (38)
to reaffirm the tenets of necronautical
materialism, to repeat: you
are always already a necronaut.
Issued by INS Department of Propaganda.
Official INS propaganda may be freely
distributed, distorted, appropriated
or adapted as the reader sees fit. |