ALYTUS PSYCHIC STRIKE BIENNIAL #8: SA(N)CABA (SITUGEOGRAPHIC QUANTUMPILGRIMAGE FROM BOTOSANI TO ALINJA) AUGUST 10-31, 2019

ATTACK WHITE SUPREMACIST CULTURE!                                                    FIND AND AMPLIFY THE VOICES OF
REPRODUCTIVE, PRODUCTIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE WORKERS WHO ARE NOT IN UNIONS OR COUNCILS!           

ALL (IN)ORGANIC COMRADES UNITE!                                                                                            GAME THE SYSTEM!

ABRACADABRA-C  (Alytus Biennial Reversion into Abolition of Culture And Distribution of its Aberrant Bacillus Right Abroad – Committee)

ÐعM提п (former DAMTP - the DaðA Miners and Travailleuse Psychique) - workers union to disrupt the creation of cultural capital through regional and a national language

Strategic Optimism Football (SOF)

Bilan:
Six years ago, in sixth year of the Proletarian Calendar [2013 Vulg.], Strategic Optimism Football club was formed in London. It was created by former members of the nomadic invisible college, the University for Strategic Optimism as a vehicle for its own self-abolition. The UfSO had been a revolutionary tendency within the UK student movement, instrumental in various conflicts with the State and Capital around 3-6PC [2010-13 vulg.]. It is remembered for its part in the storming of the Tory party HQ, of Lewisham Town Hall, the Battle of Parliament Square, etc, as well as triggering a series of viral bank occupations that in turn lit the touch paper for the Indignados and Occupy Movements. However, as a result of this fame, UfSO grew tired of fending of speaking invitations from ‘radical’ art and political organisations, increasingly finding itself recuperated by cultural institutions, from the Museum of London to the fashion supplement of the NY Times – basically anywhere ‘radical chic’ could bump up the sales figures.

The UfSO had only its time. By 6PC [2013 vulg.] the movement of which it was one of the more advanced practical-theoretical elements had dissipated and disintegrated. Even just one year after its founding, the major part of the UfSO’s energy and resources had been diverted into the Occupy movement and the UK and global struggles of 3-4PC [2011 vulg.] more broadly. One can see that in hindsight, this loss of practical coherence manifested in the UfSO’s descent into abstract theorising, resulting in internal wrangling and splits within the group. Internal sexual tumult, along with drug and alcohol addictions played their part, like they do in all good stories, but it was ultimately a political decomposition that brought about an end to the UfSO’s more radical phase of operations. From 6PC [2012 vulg.] on, its direct actions more or less ceased, it became solely an abstract venue for thinking and writing – in short it became another off-shoot of academia. The UfSO’s radicality had always inhered in its praxis, in its practical critique of the university as an institution and the class relations that produce it. Without this praxis it was nothing. After a year or so of attempting to regroup, and thinking through the slow disintegration of the ‘2011 moment’, the remaining faculty of the UfSO decided that a continuing programme of practical critique had become impossible – it had never wished to become an avant-garde without a movement. For a short while the UfSO then turned to thinking through and attempting to put across the insights that it had gained into the nature of radical pedagogy. When it became clear it had said all it had to say on the matter, and that such a project could more effectively be pursued through other groups, the last remaining participants took the decision to dissolve the UfSO as an active
organisation.

In order to do so, it was necessary to put the ‘legacy’ of the UfSO beyond reach of the would-be cultural assassins and profiteers of the worlds of art and politics. For that, what was needed was their practical supersession, something that was to be found in the collective game of three-sided football. Three-sided football was chosen because, truly, it has no author, it is and always was collectively elaborated. It was chosen because it has always remained continually in a state of triolectical incoherence and experiment – as a really existing movement. Most importantly, it was chosen as it extended the practical critique of capitalist social relations that the UfSO had, at its peak, embodied

So it was that in 6PC [2013 vulg.], the UfSO announced its auto-dissolution, but simultaneously the formation of a new triolectical football team; Strategic Optimism Football (SOF) was born. Declaring that it was triolectically inverting Marcel Duchamp’s well-known gesture of “definitively abandoning” art in favour of chess. In their case, the UfSO gave up art and politics, in order to play 3SF: the realisation and suppression of football. However, SOF’s first game was played under the banner of an international day of action against a neo-imperialist corporate land grab in the Roșia Montană region of Transylvania, rather casting doubt on this possibility from day one. Incidentally, it is a little-known fact that it was from this very game that one of three-sided football’s infamous tactical dissimulations, the so-called “Rosia’s (Triple) Cross”, obtained its name. Read more They Think it’s All Over... It is Then!