» Om Fienden

“To give ten cents to a poor man because he hasn’t any bread is perfect; but to suck his dick because he hasn’t any bread, that would be too much; you’re not obliged”

Fienden (or The Enemy as the label becomes lost in translation) was once invented, or rather constructed, by some unbegotten children. Since then, in the course of the last five or six years, it has taken on a variety of forms – it has even collapsed a few times – but its fundamental core, to which all manifestations of the label can be reduced, remains one and the same: namely Nothing.

We are well aware that we can’t stop here. For this is supposed to be the story about Fienden and therefore it needs, in one way or another, to relate to the expectations that inevitably come with the conventional story: an account of the start-up; some mundane reports of how different people have come and gone; an explanation of how we kept the energy and flame alive; a few words of those things that have kept the group united; and finally some passionate glimpses into the promising future.

But in our view there is no other way to relate to these expectations than to ignore them. We do not find it interesting to explain our historical unfolding; we do not have the desire to paint narcissistic images of ourselves; and, surely, we feel no inclination to single out an exact description of our mission. First of all, we do not believe that an art project can easily lend itself to a ready-digested category; and, secondly, we consider epithets always to run the risk of bracketing out those specificities that, hopefully, could be attributed to an art-project. In short, and to explain finally our conviction to remain silent on these concerns, we do not think that a narcissistic game, presented in the guise of a chronological story, would provide anything useful for the understanding of our work, but would only obscure and confuse that which we try to convey.

We nevertheless feel obliged to say something. To begin with, we feel urged to confront some of the ways we have been construed. One misunderstanding, perhaps the greatest, is that we are angry or furious, that we are some kind of enfants terribles. Even the highly problematic term revolutionary has been thrown into our faces, as if it would depict the essence of our Being-in-the-world. This allegation is of course far away from the truth. For what we take to be revolutionaries are those who are capable of coming to terms with the brutality of the world, and of responding to it with increased brutality. In taking this description to be valid and to compare it to the way we lead our lives it should stand clear that there are no points of convergence. We have by no means come to terms with the brutality of the world. We do not have much of a clue. Besides that, we like to think of the world in which we reside as nothing but medium-sized. And the very small elements of brutality that seep into this world of ours and which disrupt our daily routines are far more dull than explosive.

So where would we like to go with this? And what precisely do we take to be a medium-sized world? To give an answer to the former of these questions, we need first turn to the latter. Simply any of the sharper minds of our time – say, Michel Houellebecq, Slavoj Žižek or Paul Virilio – testify to the fact that our all-permissive liberal society has effectively done away with the event or the act. The event or the act is that which breaks through the strong connection between our stabilizing fantasies and our uncontested symbolic world. It opens up a gap in which we have a sense of the Real.

But our mission is not to “act” or to open up this space of the Real. We are only commentators from within, from within this medium-sized world. In this world there is no longer the belief that anything can be done to remedy the situation. The “act” has lost its credibility. It has even been deprived of its existence. In the medium-sized world it is possible to imagine the implosion of the universe, but impossible to imagine the fall of capitalism. The only possible way to relate to this deadlock is for most people to take on a cynical distance or, in Sloterdijk’s words, to assume an enlightened false consciousness: We do not believe in what we are doing – we even know that we are wrong – but nevertheless we act as if we did. We turn ourselves, by subscribing to this maxim, into borderline melancholics, into pure cynics.

Having said something about the ways in which we perceive the world, we feel it appropriate to conclude this text with some kind of mission statement. We could formulate it as something like the following: ‘The small messages we bring out are nothing else than inverted forms of the common messages we repeatedly gain from this resigned medium-sized world. But we believe that the inverted form, when it arrives again at its initial destination, displays the absurdities of the message, which, in the original form were disguised’.

If this leaves you unsatisfied we can do no other thing than to refer to the initial quote of Houellebecq. That should do as our mission statement for the time being. We think he’s perfectly right. In all respects.