The Manifesto

Since we are, we think...

X. That our duty is to know: Malevich’s paintings; the old poems of Lady Murasaki; the intricate melodies of Cecil Taylor’s piano; Gödel’s theorem and how a Turing’s machine works; Frank Lloyd Wright’s sense of space; Borges’ thoughts on immortality; how entropy relates to temperature; the sadness and melancholy on Chaplin’s movies; the name of our neighbor.

X. That the state of the world is dreadful; eternal dullness of spotless minds.

X. That is wrong to adapt oneself to a world which is stupid.

X. That we are in a certain way living in the 17th century: religious obscurantism of various kinds; dreadful political powers ruling worldwide; widespread ignorance among the youth. Sappere aude —dare to know— said Kant, and we follow him blindly.

X. That life is never complete, that there is an inherent rupture, a fracture, a cleavage, that “I” is never completely equal to “I”; and this fracture is what makes life move.

X. That life does not adapt to a given world outside it; it defines it. A cell’s structure specifies the domain of interactions which are meaningful for her. She creates the world where she lives despite of being energetically dependent on that world. To deny creation is to deny life.

X. That security is not the true desire of humanity; assume the risk, the chance, the uncertainty, and the desire of all this; and not the desire of sameness, the identity or the continuation.

X. That human beings are biological machines which create eternal truths.

X. That the only life which is worth living is the one which lives for an idea.

X. That there are four and only four domains where the New can appear: Art, Science, Politics and Love. Historically, these domains have been separated.

X. That the New comes without me being able to foresee its arrival.

X. That every man create his precursors. The New modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

X. That knowledge is necessary because the New can go unnoticed if not trapped by the web of knowledge. The old can seem new if one does not know the past.

X. That sloth leads to the constant repetition of the same; that is, living death. Life is life only insofar it has the capacity of producing the New.

X. That to be content with one’s own ignorance is selfish, since it doesn’t allow the coming of the Other. In fact, it is the most selfish act, for it is denial of the existence of the Other.

X. That ignorance is never desirable, it is not “bliss”; it is outrageous.

X. That we cannot know what is the New; what we can know is what the New was, and be faithful to it.

X. That creation must never think on posterity, nor seek to create the new; creation creates, history then judges.

X. That which has to be avoided is stagnation: the dreadful calmness of what is already known.

X. That it is not the positive content of something which makes it valuable; eventually, any rupture is integrated into the system.

X. That we must struggle for the formal procedure of creation, to give form to that which didn’t have form before.

X. That the only thing that history teaches us is that everything which we value was before negated to us (democracy, sex equality, freedom of speech) and we had to take it by means of violence.

X. That creation is a violent act; violence against reality, against what it is.

X. That our task is the creation of a new way of seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving —in short, the production of a new humanity.

X. That there is a tradition of thought that goes back in time to the Greeks, and which we must grasp again anew.

X. That knowledge is not elitist; rather, it is the only thing which does not ask anything from us, which is free and totally democratic.

X. That we are on the prehistory of humanity; that the future has a future. It’s for us to imagine it: let’s begin.

The Enschede’s Segment
June, 2011