Each year in February, students put themselves forward to run for a full-time, paid position as a Student Leader. They campaign for votes and every Essex student will have an equal chance to 'vote like a student' and choose who they want to be elected into each of the 6 roles. This is the SU Leadership Election.

Manifesto

Candidate for the position of Rebel Representatives (col)

Xela WOODHEAD

you’re either fighting for the Spectacle, or for the Imaginary Party; there’s nothing in between.

Introduction

Georges Bataille writes in, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge: "Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than Rebellion. We are no longer able to love anything, to respect anything, that bears the mark of subordination."

This necessity of Rebellion is what is missing from Rebel media, The University, The Student Union and Student Parliament. Not too long ago this university was touted as the home base of radical academia, during the miner strikes the colchester campus was even the east anglian base for the miners. Nowadays the student body won't even show support for their lecturers fighting for better working conditions. Long gone are the days of declaring a free university with student's creating their lecture programme but now we can thank our "union" for allowing us to play with clay.

There is a great irony in both the position and title of "Rebel representative" as well as "Rebel Media" and legally mandated "liberation groups," with our newely created "Liberation room." Everywhere around us the language of emancipation is present and yet it remains captured by the very institutions that hold it back. The Situationists wish they could have come up with a joke as good as calling the student media "Rebel." But alas with a straight face the university as ideological state apparatus has deemed itself rebellious. Maybe in the 60s but then again, student politics hasn't never reached the height of the 60s, beyond betraying lecturers and football darts, student politics was a geuinely radical movement even on our very campus - crucially of course this was before the marketisation of the university nationwide. It is on this point that my manifesto for rebel representative in student parliament shall begin.

The Strasbourg Scandal - or the dying days of student politics

In november 1966, 5 situationist students were democratically elected to positions within the university of Strabourg’s student union. The Situationist Students after being elected to the SU messed with them until it got shut down, most famously they stole the money given to the SU to do SU stuff and instead used it to print out 100,000 copies of ‘On the Poverty of Student Life.” This got the SU closed down by court order and the Students responsible expelled. In an act called a "situationist prank", the function of the situationist prank is to re-vitalize life from the spectacle, one of the major reasons the Situationist students won was due to the apathy of their fellow students. The apathy of the french students in the 60s can still be felt by the student of essex in 2022, one of the major arguments in relation to the strikes was that its all pointless because the Uni can just ignore them.

Two years after the Strasbourg Scandal, in May 1968 uprisings take place in Paris, and France nearly has an outright communist revolution with a mix of both stufents and workers taking part. Including students from the university of Essex. A university that once created revolutionaries now holds elections for who will run the shops and holding mixers on sustainability. As the situationists write in On the Poverty of Student Life: "As for student unionism, it is nothing but a parody of a farce, a pointless and ridiculous imitation of a long degenerated labor unionism."

But after '68 student politics would go into a hard decline and with thatcher's years of lead student politics would lose its radicality. Hence the strasbourg scandal seeming impossible these days, in the age of liberation officers any sense of rebellion is already diluted.

'There Is No Hierarchy'

In a 2015 interview with The Independent, former president of the student union, Chantel le Carpentier, claims completely seriously that at Essex 'there is no hierarchy.' Obviously this is just false no one could seriously believe this except an SU idelogue. Even funnier is when asked about on campus student politics she points out a recent campaign to ban The Sun's page 3 pornography citing the banning of The Sun and Daily Star in campus newsagents. She is right to say "the type of campaigning is different now from the earlier days." What we find in this interview is the corpse of student politics, going to france to join a revolution has been replaced with boycots. The declaration of no hierarchy coming from someone with the position of president of the SU.

But really everyone knows this, the SU is to students what the council is to local residents - an annoyance, a drag. They're both invoked in the same manner "oh we'll have to go through the SU", "oh we'll have to ring the council." Both institutions of course have been drained by central government that if they weren't legally mandated most people wouldn't miss them.

Destroy the voice box

Without knowing the content of either those running against me for the rebel position, or just candidates in any position I can predict that the phrase "make our voices heard" will show up in everyone else's manifesto. But I am not here to represent a community, its not like Rebel media even has that many members or any interests that need to be voted on in parliament. If you've read this far then you can probably realise I am not truly running to represent the interests of Rebel although I am a contributing member. As my slogan says: you’re either fighting for the Spectacle, or for the Imaginary Party; there’s nothing in between. Whilst there remains 4 faith representatives there will definetly be those fighting for the spectalce and as The Situationists write in On the Poverty of Student life:

"Everywhere else priests have been insulted and driven off, but university clerics openly continue to bugger thousands of students in their spiritual shithouses."

And who ever I am running against will certainly be fighting for the Spectacle. To destroy the voice box then is to overcome the problem of representation, to stop fighting for the spectacle and start fighting for the imaginary party. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari say a similar thing about the face:

If human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible, to become clandestine, not by returning to animality, nor even by returning to the head, but by quite spiritual and special becomings-animal, by strange true becomings that get past the wall and get out of the black holes, that make faciality traits themselves finally elude the the organisation of the face - freckles dashing toward the horizon, hair carried off by the wind, eyes you traverse instead of seeing yourself in or gazing into in those glum face-to-face encounters between signifying subjectivities. “I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, the world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatsoever… I have broken the wall… My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity, never arrested, never looking back, never dwindling… Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouths.” Body WIthout Organs. Yes, the face has a great future, but only if it is destroyed, dismantled. On the road to the asignifying and asubjective.

This is not an Acephalic Program

A vote for Xela is a vote for the Imaginary Party. And therefore I am running for Rebel Representative on the 11 point program of Acephale which goes as follows:

To establish a community for the creation of values, values for the creation of cohesion

To lift the curse, the feeling of guilt that afflicts men and forces them into wars they do not want, and which binds them to work whose benefits elude them.

To take on the function of destruction and decomposition, but as an achievement, not as a negation of being

To achieve the personal fulfilment of being and its tension by means of concentration, through a positive asceticism and positive personal discipline.

To achieve the universal fulfilment of being within the irony of the animal world and through the revelation of an acephalic universe, playful rather than one of status or duty.

To take upon oneself both perversion and crime not as exclusive values but as something that must be integrated into the human totality.

To fight for the break-up and abolition of all communities, including national, socialist and communist communities and churches, apart from this universal community.

To affirm the reality of these values and the human inequality which results, and to recognise the organic nature of society.

To take part in the destruction of the world as it presently exists, with eyes wide open to the world that will follow

To consider the world that will follow in the sense of the reality it contains now and not in the sense of some ultimate happiness which is not only inaccessible but also repellent.

11. To affirm the value of violence and the will for aggression as the cornerstone of the all-powerful

In conclusion, read On The Poverty Of Student Life :

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/members-of-the-situationist-international-and-students-of-strasbourg-university-on-the-poverty