Environments and Influences

Meaningless Manifesto: A Study in Wasted Thoughts

This time last year, carwalking jazzlistening earclogged parkgoer. Yeah, good novels about bad people, bad history lessons, arguments with religious nuts and fierce fierce hatelust. All good, pretentious, odd fun. All a load of bollocks with the exception of ‘The Project’ (which, incidentally, was not a project. Fuck knows why.) Trying to bring art terror/terror art/post-situationist mayhem to a boring town in a boring part of Britain was always doomed to failure but my dreadful attempt an engendering an experimental creativity in a hostile environment was the only thing I could think of that was worthwhile.

Most of the stuff I devised at that time was idly thought up during the most boring periods of VI form: wanderings diverted from long talks about proportional representation or tedious videos about the Weimar Republic (the dry politics talk devoid of parties or policies seems to have crept its way into the materials I wrote at that time). The fact that most of this stuff only existed in my thoughts is a reflection of the fact that ‘The Project’ started off as a daydream which turned into an increasingly elaborate fantasy which, in spite of all the steps I took, was never fully realised. My idea was to project unfathomable and ultimately meaningless words, phrases, slogans and initials everywhere. It was to reach such an extent that the police might get involved though I cannot remember why I thought any of my ideas would be breaking the law or how I was so sure that if my actions were illegal, I would inevitably evade arrest.

The first step was to devise a manifesto. Even though I had the idea of somehow roping likeminded people into contributing to ‘The Project’, I penned ‘The Manifesto’ on my own in one sitting after walking home from college and nearly getting run over by my old maths teacher. ‘The Manifesto’ was to be a pointless series of phrases supposedly outlining the rationale for and modus operandi of ‘The Project’ while not actually addressing any relevant issues at all. In essence, it was a pointless mass of text as seen below:

There are no manifestos.

This project is about our own decisions and how indecisive we are with regards to the issues with which we are supposedly most opinionated and confident. This project disputes whether the choices we make are ‘true’ choices or whether they are entirely random, determined upon by various factors beyond our control. This project calls into questions whether opposites can be real, challenging notions of positive and negative, real and unreal, intentional and accidental, right-wing and left-wing, the past and the future, life and death, darkness and light, theism and atheism, fact and fiction. This project is a non-affiliated non-partisan investigation, a non-academic study, an apolitical election. This project will disregard and transcend all existing cultural, political and social values. The only explicit value held by this project is that there is no one universal truth, whether that is religious, scientific, political, cultural or otherwise.

There are no answers.

This project has no correct or incorrect responses and asks no questions. This project has no implicit or explicit demands and is not aimed to produce any result or finding. It has no definitive beginning or end and takes place within no measurable time frame. Although the natural human desire for symmetry may inadvertently influence this project, it is not intended to depict or resemble any decipherable pattern. This project is deliberately obfuscated and contains no material or information which can be decoded at any point. No certain outcome of the project is considered to be favourable or unfavourable. This project cannot be deemed a success or a failure as no such goals have been or will be set for it.

There are no projects.

The sole reason for this ‘project’ being called so is for the sake of giving it a false sense of coherence. Aside from the use of a unified typeface across all printed and typed materials associated with the project, it will have no visible continuity. The wording of phrases may appear similar due to the natural development of an individual idiolect but this is uncontrollable and unintentional. Actions performed under the auspices of the project are not to follow any specified style, predetermined or otherwise.

Incidentally, the typeface in question was TNR which of course is virtually the standardised typeface of the English language anyway. The ‘typed materials’ refers to the only surviving physical relic of ‘The Project’ - sheets of paper which I printed off in college on one Monday afternoon featuring big blocks of text saying ‘yes’ many times on twenty sheets of paper and saying ‘no’ on the other twenty. Naturally, I got some stares as I retrieved these sheets from a very busy printer terminal which felt very encouraging. If my ideas freaked out people purely by being printed then what would they think when ‘The Project’ got into full swing and mysterious symbols appeared all over the town?

Phase one of the campaign was to parody the art of electoral literature by distributing these virtually featureless sheets of paper through the letterboxes of a rather snobby middle-class neighbourhood near my home in an attempt to cause mass confusion. I imagined families sitting around the dinner table to discuss what ‘yes’ or ‘no’ meant. Letters would be sent to the local newspaper and people would be talking about ‘The Project’ all over town just because of forty pieces of paper. If that was a success then I would print increasingly large amounts of paper, eventually requiring two accomplises to help me ‘leaflet’ various parts of town.

To enhance the feeling of ‘terror’ that would supposedly be felt by those who received my cryptic printouts, I (and my eventual comrades who would essentially do my dirty work for me like Damien Hirst getting that very talented painter to do those dot paintings for him) would wear an all-black uniform of very tight skinny jeans, a thick winter jacket, big army boots, gloves and with my face wrapped in scarves. This would also have made it harder for the police to trace me though they would have probably been more bothered than my menacing disguise than a few things put through letterboxes at random.

As I walked up the suburban streets, I imagined which houses I would target with my first wave of leaflet terror and which would remain untouched. Would the first few to receive the printed paper feel victimised or would they think they were the chosen ones? The psychology of it made me think ‘The Project’ had a serious and genuinely interesting point yet for whatever reason, those pieces of paper are still in a plastic wallet in my house.