Det affektive manifest: Før-subjektivitet og dialektiske sammenfletninger i Sture Johannessons »Psykedeliskt manifest« og »Art Crisis! A Free & High Government!«

Resumé

The Affective Manifesto: Proto-Subjectivity and Dialectical Interlacing in Sture Johannesson’s »Psychedelic Manifesto« and »ART CRISIS!«:

In spite of its break with the linguistic experimentation of the historical avant-gardes, 1960s psychedelia shares themes and morphologies with Surrealism. The psychedelic and countercultural manifesto produces a paradoxical text that I therefore try to address through Benjamin’s notion of »dialectical interlacing « between the space of the body and the space of text and image. In the psychedelic interlacing of two or more conditions in the manifesto as »modernity’s inevitable counter-discourse« (Lyon), contradictions are used dynamically to continuously defer a stable subjective and political sublation. In the torrents of becomings the psychedelic manifesto evokes, the temporal paradox inherent in the modern manifesto’s political subjectivation is emphasised; since the manifesting collective is an unacknowledged subjectivity it is a not-yet-being (Ranciére) or a proto-subjectivity (Guattari) constituted by a relation to Otherness. Sture Johannesson’s »Psychedelic Manifesto« and his poster ART CRISIS! (both 1967) tactically fold the time of the manifesto by employing it both as an inflammatory battle cry for new rights and democratic modes of production and  parody it as a modern, authentic discourse. Ultimately, a strategy of innervation (that bears comparison with later, postmodern uses of manifestic text) is privileged over antagonism. In this way psychedelia can be seen as an attempt at building a symbolic order on affect, not only from within new visual styles, but also from within self-reflexive discursive modalities.