pragmatic absurdo-anarchist manifes-toe

Huge Sillytoe’s art, activism, and research are driven by the philosophy of pragmatic absurdo-anarchism that they have developed and continue developing through their experimental performance and (auto)ethnographic research practice. Here is the first edition of their Pragmatic Absurdo-Anarchist Manifes-toe – an attempt to express the core ideas and practices of this novel (im)practical artistic-political philosophy as concisely and accessibly as possible.

This manifesto, in resistance to the unnuanced dogmatism of the traditionally staunch manifesto format, is a work in progress and will remain perennially open to change and collaboration. There is no certainty. The sole datum is the absurd.

For clarity and brevity, this manifesto does not engage directly with the broader theoretical nor empirical and ethnographic literature to have influenced it but rather presents key ideas in a condensed form.

For a more rigorous rendering of similar arguments, engaging with numerous historical and contemporary philosophers/anthropologists/artists and exploring interconnections between absurdist metaphysical philosophy and anarchist political philosophy in relation to different cultural notions of power, knowledge, and play, see Huge’s academic writing under the pseudonym ‘Dr. Hugh Sillitoe’. Get in touch if you would like to be sent some of this literature and/or the latest copy of the ever-expanding Pragmatic Absurdo-Anarchist Bibliography!

The text at hand then seeks to present – as lightly yet precisely as possible – what a pragmatic absurdo-anarchist artist/activist might be and do.

Huge Sillytoe offers their performance and other artist/activist practices as further pages in this ongoing unravelling of the pragmatic absurdo-anarchist act, and invokes other artists, activists, and creatures of all kinds to engage with these ideas in suggesting new ways to move us all closer to the total poetic liberation of all absurd beings. Please, please, pleeeease do get in touch if you would like to talk about this more and collaborate in future pragmatic absurdo-anarchist (not)happenings!

Pragmatic Absurdo-Anarchist Manifes-toe

The essence of absurdo-anarchism is that there is no identifiable fundamental meaning for being and that within this shared existential condition of ultimate default nothingness all beings are equal and thus all hierarchies of power/knowledge are intrinsically invalid.

The queen means nothing. The president means nothing. The lord, the master, and the boss mean nothing.

You do not mean anything.

I do not mean anything.

We do not mean anything.

Or rather, all of the above may (not)mean an awful lot, but only inasmuch as we interactionally co-construct and reinforce such (non)meanings with other ultimately meaningless beings.

This is not to undermine the validity of the emotions that swirl around our co-made (non)meanings.

The butterflies in your stomach, the lump in your throat, and the glow of your heart are for feeling, not negating.

Nor is this to deny that the (non)meanings that we make, or that may be manufactured by those with greater power and privilege and thrust upon the more vulnerable and marginalized, have deep socio-political consequences.

The wounds of oppression will not heal through denial.

The absurdo-anarchist artist/activist seeks precisely to acknowledge the bitter reality of inequality and subjugation at the same time as acknowledging the utter foundationlessness of such tyranny and exposing this through transgressive action and production.

In an additional step the absurdo-anarchist artist/activist might note how this very realization of the groundlessness of power and taking responsive counter-hegemonic action is potentially a simpler and less endangering step for those already less oppressed by such baseless-yet-omnipresent networks of power/knowledge. The author of this manifesto for example – a white, European male who claims to also be a daft, shape-shifting, oversized toe – notes that their ability to make such a claim and carry out associated counter-normative interventions is facilitated by their own advantaged intersectional position in relation to the very artifice of privilege that they wish for their actions to contribute to destroying.

Without a leg to stand on, fascist boots still crash down, and much heavier upon some than others.

This realization of the sheer injustice of one absurd being claiming to be superior to another absurd being and using this baseless claim to legitimate abuse, enslavement, and murder has its own emotional ramifications for the absurdo-anarchist: disgust and rage towards hierarchies; compassion and empathy for the downtrodden; bewilderment and bemusement at widespread acceptance and support of oppressive norms and power/knowledge structures even by many of those dominated by them.

Exasperation at the awful and stubborn preposterousness of Power – this may be seen as one of the primary drives of absurdo-anarchist action.

Dominant notions of ‘sense’ undergird who is broadly considered to legitimately lay claim to power and who is not. Good sense wears an expensive suit. Good sense eats their meat with the correct knife and fork. Good sense pins a medal to the cushion with which it suffocates the poor.

Thus the absurdo-anarchist crows out in both clownish falsetto and buffoonish baritone that to attack unjust matrices of power we must also attack the constructions of ‘sense’ within which they are rooted.

Here for an artist or activist to operate solely within apparently rational dominant frameworks of ‘sense’ is to risk reinforcing the very hegemonic power structures that are ostensibly opposed. Rather, the absurdo-anarchist artist/activist flamboyantly snaps and undermines norms of expected comportment.

To be called irrational, mad, childish, or idiotic by those whose judgements are dictated by ascription to dominant constructions of ‘sense’ is a compliment and a victory for the absurdo-anarchist. This is another small chip being kicked free from the border walls of a supremacist order that attempts to legitimate itself via constructions of ‘common sense’.

But the question lingers – what is the absurd?

The word’ ‘absurd’ stems from the Latin ‘absurdum’ to mean ‘out of tune’. Absurdity, in its etymological core, is disharmony. It is the cacophony raging between what one may perceive ‘should be’ and what one may perceive ‘to be’.

Here, twitching their ears a little, the absurdo-anarchist detects two primary strands of dissonance woven jarringly together.

One strand might be called existential absurdity. Here no matter how strongly we may desire it, there is no identifiable fundamental reason for being.

The second strand might be called socio-political absurdity. Here all beings are fundamentally equal within their shared inability to define any ultimate meaning for existence, yet baseless power/knowledge inequalities and associated oppressions persist regardless.

Existential absurdity is constant for all beings everywhere always, like an endless disharmonic drone.

Socio-political absurdity, whilst also inescapable, fluctuates in its expression for different populations between different places and times, like an endlessly oscillating disharmonic flurry of unjust notes.

The bagpipes, played horrendously, thus gift us a metaphor for the combination of existential and socio-political absurdity that may be seen to characterise our lives. The drone represents the fundamental meaninglessness under which we all equally live and die; the trilling higher notes of the chanter represent continually shifting yet ever-present baseless power/knowledge imbalances that unfairly afflict some more than others.

And what is anarchism?

Anarchism, in the crudest, most wonderfully crass of terms, is the rejection of authority and the assertion and defence of autonomy.

Hearing the drone of existential absurdity, recognising our fundamental equality beneath it with all beings, the absurdo-anarchist grasps an imperative to resist all authority as unjustifiable. Here the absurdo-anarchist seeks to realise a world that embraces the essential equality of all absurd beings more fully in reality, pushing the sound holes of the screeching chanter of socio-political absurdity in search of greater harmony, or at least a more obvious disharmony that may allow more widespread consideration of the shared ridiculousness of being and subsequent bald injustice of polarized wealth and power.

So why talk of pragmatism too?

Pragmatism is in essence the practice of paying attention to the possible practical applications of a theory or ideology.

With regards to absurdo-anarchism, pragmatism enters the equation with the recognition that however hard we strive for the abolition of hegemonic notions of ‘sense’ and the power structures they undergird, normative frameworks that enable and legitimate oppression and inequality inevitably persist, if potentially in an altered or mitigated form.

The number of hungry people sleeping outside the empty security-protected spare homes of the super rich; the number of sick people dying on the steps of private hospitals or under the camera lens of the tourist who yes could afford their vaccinations or anti-malarials; the number of indigenous protectors of rainforests, prairies, rivers and other ongoingly colonized lands and waters disappeared into the night air; the number of people murdered for the colour of their skin, their chosen gender, or the form of consensual sex that they enjoy – all these socio-politically absurd numbers may fall or may rise yet further.

This is to note that throughout history there has been no absolute cure for oppression, though in different times and contexts the level of inequality has been altered significantly, and often as a result of deliberate political and cultural action. The pragmatic absurdo-anarchist artist/activist, rather than pitching their teeth in the unspeakably juicy peach of utopia, thus considers how to undermine and undo the hegemonic normalisation of oppression and smash frames of constructed ‘normality’ as wholly as possible through transgressive actions.

A perfect peach can never exist, yet rotten peaches and sublimely succulent peaches certainly can and do – and here yonder comes a grand octopus juggling just such imperfect peaches, a pragmatic absurdo-anarchist cephalopod attempting to condense their realization of interlinked existential and socio-political absurdity into an act that cuts through the mirage of ‘sense’ and turns the befuddled questions of onlookers – ‘Why?’ – back onto them – ‘Why not? And why question this and not the everyday violence that surrounds us?’

Such peach pips planted within the minds of more beings are the seeds of the absurdo-anarchist ideal of total poetic liberation.

Total poetic liberation would be the moment where all beings embrace that there is no sense in anything and allow all claims to power to dissolve around them and flow into a surging current of perfect peach juice carrying rafts not just of juggling octopi but dancing porcupines, sculpting giant crabs, farming bears, drumming dragonflies, and countless other creative creatures alongside the full flourishing diversity of the human species all interlinked in unfailing networks of mutual aid. Here all the incongruous inexplicable simultaneity of beings and doings would rush at once in celebration of their shared wondrous nothingness.

This dream of the pure, naïve absurdo-anarchist is unattainable.

Our rivers are each day more toxic and porcupines rarely dance.

The pragmatic absurdo-anarchist acknowledges this impossibility of total poetic liberation but pursues it anyway. They create supersensible actions and objects: doings and makings that go beyond conventional conceptions of the sensible. In so doing they minimize assimilation to normative orders that exhort their compromise and potentially push some further seeds of imagination and dissidence into the minds of more beings, whose awkward shoots may yet grow to stunt the running of the hegemonic machine a little further.

In this way, taking the exaggerated transgression of normative structures as their practice, the pragmatic absurdo-anarchist artist/activist paradoxically becomes an enigma in attempted provocation of the (im)possible mass realization that the underlying, equalizing enigma is existence itself.

Dialectic progression towards inevitable (r)evolution or apocalypse is chewed up by the absurdo-anarchist and spat out in globs that (des)align to form a supersensible script that may inspire a tragicomic intermingling of both hope and despair, fascination and boredom, love and gloom.

A pragmatic absurdo-anarchist act is thus one that sees the ultimate equality of all beings within meaninglessness, seeking as such to undermine and deconstruct all normative hierarchal artifices, whilst at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of such total deconstruction of power/knowledge, yet continuing in the attempt regardless, going nowhere but getting somewhere and laughing along the (no)way.

A pragmatic absurdo-anarchist artist/activist is a co-maker of counterhegemonic (non)meaning. For now, such absurdo-anarchist art and performance may keep our hearts pumping to strange and unruly rhythms while our bodies, and some bodies much more than others, remain in chains. The hope, emboldened by each courageous creative act of transgressive and compassionate non-compliance, is that we may get closer and closer to conditions where we will all be able to make our shackles into puppets. This manifesto is an invitation to join in creating transgressive actions and things that might tickle our world towards a more radical celebration of the endlessly diverse potentialities of mutually compassionate absurd being. Together we are not only stronger, but stranger too. We must keep trying to sing the glorious gibberish of a universal love that embraces its own meaninglessness. What else is there to do?