'There are two ways of making investigations, one is to look at flowers on horseback and the other is to get off your horse and look at them. If you look at flowers on horseback, you'll only get a superficial impression, as there are so many.' - mao.
mao admonishes the intellectuals to get off their horses and take a closer look - thence the 68'ers into the factories, horsemouth escaped this by becoming the horse.
horsemouth has been out to sunny northwick park. the library was very good. he read a little of alternative communities in 19th C. england by dennis hardy, which has photos of the agapemone commune at four forks, spaxton in somerset. there the poet david grubb (beneath the visiting moon) used to play organ as a boy and the class structure of victorian society was intended to be taken directly over into heaven (and indeed was as they all successively died off). earlier there was also a co-operativist commune just opposite mount pleasant sorting office (the co-operativist and economical society, spafields, clerkenwell 1821-24, george mudie, owenites (basically)).
horsemouth also read the introduction to althusser: a critical reader by gregory elliot. there were accounts of althusser's funeral, derrida quoted a passage from for marx, in fact from bertolazzi/ brecht the famous essay.
'Yes, we are first united by an institution – the performance, but more deeply, by the same myths, the same themes, that govern us without our consent, by the same spontaneously lived ideology. Yes, even if it is the ideology of the poor par excellence, as in El Nost Milan, we still eat of the same bread, we have the same rages, the same rebellions, the same madness (at least in the memory where stalks this ever-imminent possibility), if not the same prostration before a time unmoved by any History. Yes, like Mother Courage, we have the same war at our gates, and a handsbreadth from us, if not in us, the same horrible blindness, the same dust in our eyes, the same earth in our mouths. We have the same dawn and night, we skirt the same abysses: our unconsciousness. We even share the same history – and that is how it all started.'
balibar noted that althusser wanted 'to be at once totally a philosopher and totally a communist'.
later (camberwell) horsemouth killed more time in the library first with a guide to ranciere and his re-readings of the french utopians (and literary wannabees). these he used to split himself off from the althusserian project (he was one of althusser's disenchanted) - an icarian commune in egypt, who knew? a small green book in an odd format winked at him from the stacks, it was germano celant's the record as artwork (1977 fort worth art museum) - a photo essay on futurist, dadist, conceptual art recordings. it featured michael snow's musics for piano, whistling, microphone and tape recorder (seemingly the basis for the noise and capitalism book cover).
horsemouth's grandfather (on his father's side) was born yesterday in 1908 - at one point, just after the second world war there was a plan to go help found an agricultural commune in new zealand, but at the innaugural meeting in london horsemouth's grandfather realised he was the only one who knew anything about farming (so with that harsh yorkshire practicality that was that). it does however answer the key utopian question, 'how do you get to utopia? by rainbow or railway?'
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