PART ONE
O Sister, Where Art Thou?
You are walking through Budapest. The city is hot and stinky. The urine smell merges with the stench from trash bins and car smog. You are crossing a square. The grass is sunburned. A lot of homeless people take refuge here, trying to cool themselves under some trees. With every day, you see growing pain in the streets. Open wounds, skin diseases, and drug addicts who shout at an invisible other. You walk further and another person begging comes into view. You turn away your gaze because you still don’t have any coins, or are not willing to give any more. Thinking about that makes you feel guilty, and the inner monologue starts over – or better, a dialogue. Voice#1: “But I make art, and that will change society”, Voice#2: “Will it the f*ck?! You know full well, that it won’t make the price of bread get cheaper!”[1] This dialectic flow of thoughts keeps you going. On the next corner, some parent screams at their kid or violently pull them further, and everywhere people are begging for money, and digging in the trash. If zombie films were inspired by the street life of Los Angeles, the Hungarian film future is clear. Neoliberal ruins that you are navigating through. A field of war as normality. Just like in a computer game.
You are about to write an article about your artistic practice in relation to activism. You wonder: since when do we label political engagement actually as “activism”? And why did the so-called “art” and the so-called “activism” become so close lately? Or better: why did they get separated in the first place? What has happened since a hundred years ago, when competing revolutionary projects raced along the field with the aim of changing life and society via art? What has happened since the time when art was an act of demonstration against bourgeois self-righteousness? As Tristan Tzara wrote in his 1918 Dada Manifesto: “The new artist protests: he no longer paints (symbolic and illusionist reproduction) but creates directly in stone, wood, iron, tin, boulders—locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation.” What happened during this long century of hope that we are again theorizing about art and its connection to social action? You keep walking and observing the fiercest and most obscene fight for space, food, and very soon also fresh water. You are wearing the robe of an artist: a professional of empathy and social visions. You are on a mission. You are one of us.
Artists are today’s primary affective workers. We don’t do it for the money but for love. We work with our friends; we do art together. Friendship becomes part of our work, work becomes part of our friendship. It turns into torture. By the end of the project, we hate each other and are all frustrated. We keep marching anyway, getting lost in project plans, instead of dancing. We lose time.
Art and activism are deeply connected in that they make a change. Artists are considered “change-makers,” just like market innovators. Artists make a change in people’s minds. In this, our job is very close to social work, therapy, and politics. Art oscillates on this wide scale of competencies, blurring their boundaries. What artists do is undoubtedly a special type of work and yet it looks rather like the mimicking of work. That is why artists are considered lazy and need to prove the usefulness of their nonsensical work. Please proceed to checkout! How much art did you produce today? How much is it worth, what should be written on the price tag? Are you sure your art matters that much? Who could confirm that? Are you sure you will fulfill your mission? You are the advertising spot for the product made of blue haze, a fart, and that is art.
Art is open. Art is a losing game, as Amy Winehouse might have sung. Activism is full of purpose: it needs to envision a future. Artists often join forces with activists, because social action also needs imagination, openness, and beauty. Knowing the end result is necessary for an efficient action. But isn’t this amount of purpose too much for art? Activism uses campaigning, it develops PR strategies to promote a cause. And the taste of this is often dull, moldy, or flat because campaigning is the core of neoliberalism, and of all its products. Art can only breathe in the twist of such logic, in the cracks of productivity: if it blows up the normal structures and perceptions for a moment. If it makes that given moment dance, and if another energy flows through a space or a group of people who take part in an action. An artistic action can be useful, but it only remains art as long as it offers the given action the potential of becoming something else. Just like Tristan Tzara’s “locomotive organisms capable of being turned in all directions by the limpid wind of momentary sensation.” The more the purpose is reached, the more successful social activism is. Bad news for art, because the more a preset purpose is reached, the more art disappears. The question is: can an effective social action contain the freedom of becoming something else? Can an effective action contain failing? Does art submit itself to the regime of purpose, or develop its own aesthetic resistance through its implementation?
Or if you turn it around: can a failed action be a success nonetheless? Marx said the biggest achievement of the Paris Commune of 1871 was nothing else than its “working existence.” The fact that it worked, even if only for 72 days. Even if it failed, its repercussions lasted much longer. You would say it didn’t make a lasting change, it didn’t overthrow systems. But many of its ideas and practical solutions are valid to this day – the idea of compulsory public education or the system of the crèche, just to name two. The Commune put into action utopist ideas like the equality of intelligences (as practiced by Jacotot in the mid-1800s, described by Jacques Rancière in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster). Within a very short time, the Communards implemented a decentralized system of education in Paris, which was meant to emancipate the people to be autonomous thinkers and makers at the same time, as opposed to being simply useful citizens with specialized skills. Art was inseparable from the “Universal Republic” to be founded. It was part of equality in action, which is only possible if we don’t keep competencies separated that are usually kept apart: that of the head and hand. Kristin Ross describes this wonderfully in her recent book about the political imaginary of the Commune.[2] In this, she puts the limelight on artisan workers as key figures in 1871, people who never had a formal education in arts or science. “Everything is in everything” was the guiding maxim of Eugène Pottier, one of the foremost partisans of integral education during this period, himself an autodidact designer, today best remembered – if at all – as the author of “L’Internationale.” The Commune was overthrown, and the Third Republic was erected on the dead bodies of many Communards. Yet, its “working existence” gives us inspiration to this day. Communards didn’t create a campaign or an action plan. There was no time for it as the Prussian army was at the gates of Paris. It was a “working laboratory of political inventions, improvised on the spot or hobbled together out of past scenarios and phrases (…)” – describes Kristin Ross, and she goes on to observe: “Actions produce dreams and ideas, and not the reverse.”[3]
You still wonder about failing. In the British mini-series “Black Mirror,” there’s an episode in which people ride stationary bikes in exchange for “merits”, a currency used to buy essentials and virtual entertainment. A young man falls in love with one of his co-workers, a girl who he hears singing in the bathroom. He convinces the girl to enter a talent show. She sings miraculously, but the judges say they cannot hire another singer and offer her a job as a pornographic performer in the virtual entertainment business. In an act of revenge, the young man also enters the competition, and upon stepping on the stage he threatens to commit suicide for real. But instead of stopping the show, his “authentic” act garners big success among the judges and audience, and he gets hired as a performer with his “suicide act” on TV. A bitterly satirical view of how bare acts of revolt get immediately framed by an abstract system of spectacle. Is our resistance, be it so powerful, condemned to fail against capitalism’s eternal optimism? And if so, why are we still doing so optimistically what we are doing? Why do we keep our faith in social interventions when it is clear to us that our political systems are built around people’s inability to express themselves and intervene?
If we make art, activism, or any merger of both, we work within the realms of Spectacle. A Spectacle that shuns death and failing because they would remind it of its own finitude, it shuns laughter because it would remind it of its absurdity. The solution is not to give in to the Spectacle, but to invite failing into our workings and have a laugh about it. The risk of failing needs to be kept up and defended at all times. Failing and laughter are in our heads and hearts when we work. Without them, we are not able to break the enchantment of a system that takes itself way too seriously while dragging us into a constant war (called competition) against each other and against nature.
When we make art, we don’t give a damn about it being good art, we don’t give a damn about the canons and the value of our work. We want to reconquer our lives to find ways out of the impoverishment and scarcity we are all conditioned to, without which capitalism can’t work. We play with and against the ubiquitous ratio that governs our world. We follow the data highways in our heads, speeding up along the lines. But sometimes we should just get a pneumatic hammer and drill down to the soil underneath the concrete. We don’t get anchored, we turn our heads around and get dizzy with directions, we jump above, and we keep hopping and bopping.We are playing with thoughts, picking up old ideas and then new ones, and creating a fourth dimension out of them for our “now.” In the end, the joy lies in the fact that what we do works at all, and that we really don’t know what comes next.
Are you still going on? Searching for something? Maybe a conclusion, although you are basically against conclusions. You get a bit dizzy – you feel like Tzara when he admits: “I write a manifesto and I want nothing, yet I say certain things, and in principle, I am against manifestos, as I am also against principles.” Anyway, if you walk further, maybe you’ll find something lying on the ground that was so far overlooked. Glass marbles that no one picked up because only children play with them. But the light shines brightly in the shop windows of art, so you can take a couple of those glowing glass marbles and try to smash the shop windows with them.
PART TWO
PNEUMA TAROT
Dear Reader, are you still with us? Tired of marching? Then it’s time for a change of pace. Welcome to the next section of this text: the Pneuma tarot.[4] This part will lead you to a different your-self.
We live in a disenchanted bureaucratic culture, in which it is Big Data that seems to be able to contain our greater essences – in form of numbers and co-occurrences. In order to cope with it, people come up with all kinds of magic practices nowadays. They want to regain the sense in their lives and re-enchant life again. Many times this happens in the distorted form of conspiracy theories, as Adam Curtis observed.[5] In a lighter way, this leads to all kinds of new urban spiritualism, shamanism, and co. Also, Tarot is on the rise today in cultural circles, because it soothes our thirst for being part of something bigger, making a mystical sense of reality.
Our artist co-op Pneuma Szöv. has been working since 2008 on building up a cosmos of various motives, themes, objects, magic animals, and other autonomous beings. For the special occasion of this article, we decided to unravel some motives of this cosmos and bring them together with the oracle trend of Tarot. We hope that our special Arcanum will bring you some insights about your own work, too. Let the reading begin!
0 – THE FOOLS
Fooling, Falling, Failing
The Fools open the Tarot. If you are attracted to this card, you are on a way to bigger clairvoyance than you might think you are. The Fools fuel you with the necessary attitude towards yourself and society. The Fools rely on laughter and fooling around. Aiming to maintain their feet above the ground, the Fools tend to fly. Mostly, you will try to fly and fall on your nose, as you say in German or in Hungarian for falling down. That’s why an imagined clown nose wouldn’t hurt when you go on your life path, so you won’t get hurt when falling down.
The Fools show us the importance of failure and laughter. In our forced positive culture failure equals defeat. Embrace your inner anxieties and failures, and get rid of false positivity, just like the tragicomedian duo from TV Free Europe,[6] Mari Szürke, and Marie Grau in the picture. The Fools can help you laugh while failing.
The Fools can also give you a key to not getting all too depressed or insensitive about the ills of society. Let yourself be fooled instead of pulled down! In the corner of the picture, you see a kid sitting on a rocket. It reminds you to keep the gap as big as possible between the seriousness of the given issues and the humor they are dealt with. This contrast creates a crucial distance, where new ways of communication become possible and where art can enter.
CHALLENGE: In the circle of Tarot the Fool stands right next to the Knight of Pentacles, the dutiful and earth-bound worker, who acts many times against his or her own desires. (S)he does it with good intentions, wanting to provide a solid base for higher aims. (S)he is an enabler of the flow of things. Challenge yourself: are you, as the Fool, able to reach inner freedom while having the Knight looking over your shoulder? Won’t the dutiful Knight take over your free spirit as you go along? This was a dilemma for some Communards in 1871 too. One of them, Élisée Reclus, helps you with his presence in the background of the card. He himself experienced setting out to change the world and then losing sight of the revolutionary cause, ending up with the horizons and daily activities of a “simple grocer”:
“It is easy to confine oneself to one’s “good work,” thrusting aside the concerns and dangers that arise from devotion to the revolutionary cause in its full scope. One tells oneself that it is especially important to succeed in an undertaking that involves the collective honor of a number of friends, and one gradually allows oneself to be drawn into the petty practices of conventional business. The person who had resolved to change the world has been transformed into nothing more than a simple grocer.”[7]
Keep following the radical playfulness of the Fools, even after the working day is done!
I – MAGICK SQUIRREL
If you pull this card, stop for a moment. Put this text aside now and just look at the objects that surround you. What do you see? What lies on your table? What hangs on your walls? What are these objects made of? What kind of stories do they tell? Did you buy them? Did you make them? Who made them? And how?
If you have many things you bought freshly in the store: Congratulations! Your consumption is at an advanced level! You’ve just got tricked by shiny advertisement surfaces that create new desires for you. Consult the Magick Squirrel and its special form of economy!
This card leads you into a deep mind juggling. The Magick[8] Squirrel can teach you to let go of your vanities and bring your circumstances into play. The trick lies in rediscovering a view of things that make do without commercial value and functionality.
Capital appropriates life and uses it to grow beyond every earthly limit. When you feel driven to this card, it might indicate that you need to dive deeper into the forms of life that go beyond your usual ways of exchange. In order to prepare you to challenge these habits, we introduce you to the great story of Mack the Squirrel after whom this powerful card is named.
The urban legend of Mack the Squirrel developed throughout our 2012 project, the “Twenty Forint Operetta,”[9] which used an empty lot in Budapest as its base. Granted to us by the local municipality, we were able to use this lot for a whole summer. We started out with the somewhat absurd yet simple plan to build a giant squirrel. The idea stemmed from an allegorical short story by homeless writer Csilla Horváth (HoCsi), in which the politician squirrel tries to solve the problem of slugs (who obviously have no homes), as they start to bother the forest’s quiet life. Already around 2012 the cityscape of Budapest was highly dominated by street homelessness, and the local district’s mayor stepped up as an avant-garde of criminalizing it. We decided to deploy a squirrel against this political tendency. This is how the homeless squirrel Maxi or Mack (referring to Brecht’s Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera) was born. Slowly the lot has become a magnet to the most variegated folks: kids from the neighboring municipal apartments, middle-class residents from the gentrifying neighborhood, loners, passers-by, and soon their friends too.
Mack the Squirrel became the magic driver of this temporary community. We have collaborated with associations of homeless artists to nurture the legend with new texts, stories, and songs. Anyone could come to the open lot, add something to the squirrel statue in progress, beautify the lot or use it for his/her own purposes (enjoying the shade, getting a haircut, taking part in soap operetta shootings, practicing dance moves …). When something was added, nothing was expected in return. The squirrel economy worked fine; clearly, we all have an abundance of things we don’t need. And thus people donated, for example, hair to the squirrel. Useless plastic bottles of cheap wine, lying around everywhere in the district, became precious parts of the squirrel’s body. And when the local mayor made an attempt to censor our project in the fear that Mack was actually a parody of him, we realized how powerful our squirrel has become. Suddenly, the building lot felt like a power center, where a wittily resistant way of communication has emerged that bureaucrats don’t understand. The “squirrel economy” was locally bound, but adaptable to many situations. Anyone can follow its principles. Try it if you dare!
CHALLENGE: Think of things you don’t need anymore. These can be an old object, a forgotten dream, or a lost thought. In order to establish a squirrel economy, invite others to do the same. If you put these different parts together, they will slowly merge into a cosmos of connected things, ideas, and legends, filled with life, enchanted by the stories behind their building blocks. Through the Magick Squirrel, the banal objects will get a shiny new life that opposes the market economy. The Magick Squirrel wants to draw your attention to the value of revolutionary modesty. It offers a glimpse into another system, a whole abundance made of cheap things, trash, and forgotten ideas. Don’t use the smooth advertisement aesthetics! Don’t pretend to be sovereign, don’t have the plan ready! This will confuse bureaucrats and delude art critics. Selling yourself with a mission-driven seriosity seems to be the key to success today, but the Magick Squirrel will help you to transcend it and celebrate the immanence[10] of the given process.
II – THE HIGH PIGEON
As one of Pneuma Szöv.’s collaborators noted while sitting on Blaha Lujza Square in Budapest: “The pigeons move freely over the square. Every pigeon is in dialogue with every pigeon. They form a community because they have the same interests. It’s not a closed community. Every pigeon can fly wherever it wants, and new ones can join. Humans sit either as single persons or in small groups. It rarely happens that these many human parties interact. The only thing that connects them is the place with its rules, which everyone follows.”[11]
Pigeons used to be seen as the flying rats of our cities. In their greyness, they blend into the grey pavements. But observing them, you can see some interesting patterns.
The High Pigeon card helps you overlook your surroundings from a bird’s perspective. Moving freely between structures, the Pigeon reveals hidden ideologies. Identify with the High Pigeon, and take a look from the bird’s perspective at the structures that govern you. Take a deep breath, take a distance.
What are the bigger patterns carved into the pavement? Concrete covers our cities, concrete covers our daily life structures, and overall it cements our ways of acting and thinking. The theaters disappear like the National Theater on this card which formerly stood on Blaha Lujza Square in Budapest. Institutions become phantasmagorias and disappear one after the other.
How to self-institute in other ways? Look at the card again. The High Pigeon put on the mask of Hungarian actress Lujza Blaha, “the nation’s nightingale” as they called her. Her wings are made of advertisement inserts from newspapers.
In order to preserve your life-saving structures, you have to be able to alter them. You have to be ready for the mind game with your surroundings in order to stay up in the air. The pigeon’s message is: connect to the local ground and to your own needs as well.
Can we still create structures like a National Theater? Seeing the devastation of our cultural institutions, we become like birds without wings, and there’s nothing to peck at.
The High Pigeon can’t bring you the ultimate solution, but she can give you a different view. Build new channels and connections between institutions, residents, and places. Build a Cloud Cuckoo Land,[12] a new kind of institution that might function in-between things, differently than expected. Generate energy on the connecting lines. Move your head like the pigeon does, forward and backward, to get your mind game going. The High Pigeon teaches us to see the richness of our surroundings and how to invigorate it with energy. Peck, peck.
CHALLENGE: Choose a simple form of walking that is slightly different from normal (remember the Ministry of Silly Walks). Keep doing it for one street or more. When you move differently, the structure will bend and the boundaries will move. You will reach the boundaries of the ideology of public spaces. You probably will attract and create other energies than normally. Practice it as much as possible in order to prepare yourself for the upcoming uprisal.
VI – THE LOVERS
“Absurdly, the state defines the social act of coming-together as anti-social, because it creates a space in which different kinds of social relations can be formed. The state wishes to have a monopoly on how people interrelate, and so acts to prevent people from associating horizontally. Another example of antiproduction is the way that participation in imposed activities such as the requirement to work and the unpaid reproductive labour involved in families, leaves little time for other kinds of relationships – people don’t have time to form other assemblages either with other people or with other objects of desire. Hakim Bey has argued that this pressure to restrict connections is so strong that simply finding time and space for other forms of belonging – regardless of the goal of these other connections – is already a victory against the system.” (Andrew Robinson)[13]
The Lovers throw the question of being together back to you. How to avoid isolation? How to transgress nuclear thinking that blanks out the sense of solidarity and belonging? The Lovers know that such nuclear structures are made to disable the natural sense of love between people. Without noticing it, nuclear structures grow around and upon us and keep us apart from each other.
Today, we tend to create isolated retreats, micro-societies around us. The Communards in 1871 understood this danger very well. The Commune was established in Paris, and the government in Versailles did everything it could to alienate them from people in the countryside. They tried to prevent people of different walks of life from discovering common interests. Communards knew they should embrace localism and universalism at the same time. Look at Kropotkin, whose shadow is mirrored in the left corner. He says: It is not enough to rest in your social bubble! The Commune of today should try “to extend itself, to universalize itself… In place of communal privileges it has to put human solidarity.”[14] “For us, ‘Commune’ no longer means a territorial agglomeration; it is rather a generic name, a synonym for the grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The social Commune will soon cease to be a clearly defined entity.”[15]
This card leads you leads you on the path to a universal commune universal commune. The Lovers will not let you stay in your retreat. As the anarchist Élisée Reclus wrote: „(…) will anarchists create for themselves Icaries[16] on the outskirts of the bourgeois world? … I don’t think so and I don’t want it… In our plan for existence and struggle, it isn’t a little côterie of companions that interests us. It’s the whole world.“[17]
CHALLENGE: As a magickal artist you tend to feel safer in isolated micro-societies. Deal with your borders! Don’t get too cozy in your peripheries! Sit down in the street and just listen to what happens. Put another chair next to yours. You have just created a TV studio! See who will sit next to you for a chat. What does your TV transmit? To whom? Scripted by who? While you are sitting there, the TV Tower will be trembling vigilantly in the wind to give the emission a meditative start. Don’t forget: you need to make magick here and now. … how to do it? Go to the TV Tower.
XVI – THE TV TOWER
Something old dies
TV is dead, long live TV! The card of the TV Tower signalizes that something new seeks to begin.
On your flickering screen a strong radiation. A hole got shot in the grid of information. The eternally burning TV sun implodes in its own spectacle, here and there some wires crack, and E.T. is surfing on the last wave, some are waiting for the next catastrophes to break in.
The card drives you to the basic question: What do you perceive in the pixel streams of your media? When you go into meditation mode, can you transcend your desires and fears? Is this the path to go? When you pull this card, it is time to ask where you want to go. Do you want to stay in the shade of the tower? Do you want to climb to the top? You realize: there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path. You have to stop dreaming. Welcome to the desert of the real.[18]
This card shows you that your most precious resource is endangered, probably everybody’s resources are at a brutal stake right now. If you switch on your screen, you will see that an apocalypse is happening in many areas around the world. If you feel attracted to this card, it means that you realized the urgency of action. An apocalyptic wave is rolling towards us. Maybe you knew it deep down already, but still, in your practice, this knowledge hasn’t gotten really implemented yet. You need to act now. Will you surf on it, can you swim? Do you need extraterrestrial powers? You are still standing in the shadow of the TV tower. If you take a closer look, it turns out to be a water tower. Water is a precious resource for you! Your own position might be still safe, but it is definitely time to get up right now and engage so the tower doesn’t collapse. From far away you can hear a song:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye wretched of the earth!
For justice thunders condemnation:
A better world’s in birth!
No more tradition’s chains shall bind us;
Arise, ye slaves, no more in thrall!
The earth shall rise on new foundations:
We have been naught, we shall be all![19]
The TV tower lets you choose your own weapons. If you follow the path of TV Free Europe,declare a Silvester party[20] and celebrate each day as if it was the last one of this year. Ask yourself: what is your resolution for the next year and why wait till the 1st of January? Make a Silvester Revue. Wherever you are, whenever. Say goodbye to the old and rise like a phoenix!
CHALLENGE: We can’t give you a challenge anymore. It is all out there already. So stop focusing on useless art, focus on how to not just add something to the discourse about change, but engage in it. It might be a sign that rather sooner than later you should leave career planning behind you and turn to the eternal values of love, solidarity, and direct action. Because the tower is falling right now and things look pretty f*cked. Don’t give a f*ck about unimportant things. Give a f*ck about the important things.[21]
We need a transmission break.
This text was written in the summer and fall of 2021 during the Covid19 pandemic, before Russia’s war against Ukraine.
The illustrations were made by Sarah Günther, Dorottya Poór, and Luca Szabados
Pneuma Szöv. is an artists co-op working mainly in Budapest since 2008 with collaborations and temporary exiles internationally. They launch processes that trouble the regimes of our daily lives and re-enchant what seems to be obvious and unchangeable. Their post-dramatic performances meld artistic research, social philosophy, and urban studies with various forms of visual art, community and public art, free pedagogy, and activism, in preparation for a different potential society to come.
Sarah Günther, as the artistic director of Pneuma Szöv. and in her other works, creates experimental theatre and art that radically plays around the constraints of our lives and the self-selling mechanisms of capitalism.
Zsuzsa Berecz is a dramaturge and cultural worker based in Budapest. She is a co-founder and member of the Budapest-based artists co-op Pneuma Szöv. She initiates and connects, mediates, and transcends, she tinkers around the edges while dancing along.
[1] Reference to Bertolt Brecht’s The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent (Das Baadener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis), in which the Pilots proudly tell about the civilizatory and technical achievements of mankind to which the dialectical choir keeps answering: “The price of bread did not get cheaper” (“Das Brot wurde dadurch nicht billiger”).
[2] Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015).
[3] Ibid., 7.
[4] The Pneuma tarot is mostly inspired by the Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot.
[5] Adam Curtis, “Adam Curtis on the Dangers of Self-Expression,” The Creative Independent, March 14, 2017, https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/adam-curtis-on-the-dangers-of-self-expression/.
[6] A transnational TV experiment initiated by Pneuma Szöv. and KÖME – Association of Cultural Heritage Managers in 2019: https://tv-free-europe.eu.
[7] Élisée Reclus, “Evolution, Revolution and the Anarchist Ideal,” quoted by Kristin Ross in Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015), 121-122.
[8] “Magick, in the context of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, is a term used to show and differentiate the occult from performance magic and is defined as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” including “mundane” acts of will as well as ritual magic.” “Ceremonial magic,” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, July 24, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_magic.
[9] More about the project: https://pneumaszov.org/mokus-maxi-a-tolnai-lajos-utcaban/.
[10] For the concept of Immanence see Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (University of Minnesota Press, 1987), or Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on Life (Zone Books, 2001) or simply consult wikiwand for a first grab of it.
[11] Till Korfhage’s constitution was written on Blaha Lujza Square, Budapest, 8th district, in the framework of the Wandering Street University 2013 organized by Pneuma Szöv. and Mobile Albania.
[12] A reference to Aristophanes’s drama The Birds.
[13] Andrew Robinson, “Why Deleuze (still) matters: States, war-machines and radical transformation,” Ceasefire Magazine, September 10, 2010, http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-deleuze-war-machine/.
[14] Quoted by Ross in Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015), 118.
[15] Peter Kropotkin, The Commune, quoted by Ross in Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015), 123.
[16] Reference to Étienne Cabet’s 1840 utopian novel Voyage to Icaria, and the utopian socialist communities established by him in Iowa.
[17] Élisée Reclus, “Les Colonies anarchistes,” Les Temps Nouveaux, July 7, 1900, 1-2., quoted by Kristin Ross, ibid. 119.
[18] As Morpheus told to Neo in the movie Matrix.
[19] “The Internationale,” American version, translated by Charles Hope Kerr.
[20] In several European countries, e.g. in Germany and Hungary, Silvester refers to New Year’s Eve.
[21] For more info about what to give a f*ck about: Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (Harper, 2016).
