Posted on by qscrisp

Active Resistance to Propaganda

I'm posting here, Vivienne Westwood's manifesto, Active Resistance to Propaganda, as a pdf link. I won't say, for the moment, what I think of it myself, partly because, on first reading, I'm not entirely sure. However, I would be interested in other opinions.

12 Replies to “Active Resistance to Propaganda”

  1. RHN as religion. Very artistic indeed.PS: Speaking of artistic design, I find this to be more PostHuman than the art manifesto.PPS: Speaking of that DESIGN-INTERACTIONS-AT-THE-RCA website, I initially thought the menu wrapping was an artistic decision by design, only to discover it’s an Opera (or Firefox) rendering bug.

  2. Well, I’ll give a little of my thoughts on the manifesto. I started off thinking it was complete nonsense, but found there to be some good bits in it, and was interested enough to read the whole thing. I’m not convinced by the idea that art will save the world, though. That seems like a kind of self-important idea.Similarly, I don’t think technology will save the world. I don’t even like the idea of ‘posthuman’, depending on the interpretation of the word. If ‘posthuman’ equals ‘transhuman’, then, well, that’s something that makes me very keen to die and be forgotten. I’ve no doubt it will happen, though, creating previously unimagined social elites, widening more than ever in history the gaps between rich and poor and precipitating a downward spiral away from any kind of spiritual well-being, since everything then will become an arms-race for technical perfection in order to be top-dog, something like the pressure that exists for athletes to take steroids.

  3. Justin Isis writes:

    I think most of it I disagree withLike thinking of art as a mirrorI disagree with that.I also disagree with Diogenes not believing in himself, I feel like if he didn`t believe in himself he wouldn`t have the confidence to be consistent. In my experience people who don`t really believe in themselves are rarely all that consistent. I don`t know about `Representative Human Nature` either; I feel like almost everything is based on culture; if you raised people in some kind of controlled environment where nothing changed, then there would be no change because the people there would have no outside influences to allow them to think `outside` of anything. I like her clothes, though.

  4. I didn’t really get the ‘Representative Human Nature’ bit, and I’ll probably have to read it again. It sounds a bit like humanism, which I’m not really into. I did like her assessment of conceptual art. And I like some of the quotes from Whistler, but not all. And I’ll have to read it again to be more particular about which bits I liked.I suppose in as far as there’s a suggestion of linking with something like a group unconscious through art, I would agree, but she seems very willing to circumscribe that unconscious within certain boundaries, which I would be less willing to do. Perhaps this is similar to what Dantesoft was saying about RHN as religion. To recognise some part of the group unconscious and then to say that’s the whole thing and claim it as your own is, well, how religions are formed. Also, I don’t know why she’s confident that living by this (by what, exactly?) will change your life.Anyway, it was interesting.

  5. Maybe I am just an old fashioned git but it reads like a complete load of pretentious garbage and makes about as much sense as many iof the drug fuelled ideas that came out of the 60’s as an answer to mans failings in the previous 50 years

  8. I’ll just add that I’m actually interested in the idea of pretentiousness at the moment, and wondering whether there’s a way to make a distinction between just being into different stuff, and actually being pretentious. At the moment, I’m thinking that what lies behind and defines real pretentiousness is when someone is selling something. In other words, they want to appear that they have something you don’t, such as some secret knowledge that they might share with you for a price. I’m not sure about the Vivienne Westwood thing. I suppose I feel that, although I found it interesting enough to read, it’s not really helpful. I mean, if she were writing a kind of short story or something, fine, but she’s called it a manifesto, so, I’m not sure why she doesn’t just say what she means in that case. Might add to this later…

  9. Anonymous writes:

    thanks for posting this. its a delight to read and reread.i too believe in her genuine nature.shes a positive force, in touch with what lay beyond the visible eye.

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