Mediamatic Magazine Vol. 6#2/3 Adilkno 1 jan 1991

ADILKNO

Academy

ADILKNO is the Dutch society for the advancement of illegal knowledge.

Vergroot

Adilkno -

ADILKNO and Its media

Speculation begins beyond the zero point of meaning. Once words are set free of the burden of information they must bear, they are transported away and go out exploring. Once they go their way, they prove able to follow any logic and able to anticipate any information with which they could ever possibly be saddled. Speculating with language follows the maxim Prevention is better than deconstruction. During the working hours of the ADILKNO options market, idea systems, arbitrary data and unavoidable situations are short-circuited to the vanishing point in the future after which nothing meaningful can be done with all these expectations. The ADILKNO speculator operates beyond the future, away from any potential readers' market. The rampant growth of words summons a chaos field through which the text determines its fatal course. Then everyone can only look on, including the mixmasters themselves.
These speculative practices operate in a vacuum which the urge for text renewal has not been able to fill. A corrupt atmosphere hangs around the ADILKNO contributions which smells of failure. The columns do not fulfill the legitimate desire for shrieking assertion of the manifesto and just as little for the careful openings the essay can offer. One doesn't quite want any academic discourses or journalistic impressions, just to air the mind. This serene frame of mind is soon spoiled if one accidentally gets caught up in the fire of an adilknoian line of reasoning. Every sentence an open end – it doesn't purify the thoughts: it simply makes you clam up. It offers you no perspective if you know how everything will end, without it being said whether anything constructive can be thought about it. The experiments with words in the 20th century were expeditions to the innermost places in language. They were always fun to look at. Speculation, nonetheless, seeks the outer edge of language, there where shadows from elsewhere become readable. Here too lie the edges where the garbage heaps up and vague rumours go around and where the vermin scuttles about, hatches plots and yanks at the slot machines, in the hope that the right combination of discourses produces the winning sentence, at which point the profits are immediately put to use for new speculations. Writing ultimately only costs ADILKNO money, just like with the gambling addicts.
ADILKNO never states its sources. This is not done out of a desire for secrecy. In the media the text needs no context; that only increases the information load. Once the quote is pulled out of its context and perverted, magic words sprout from the remains of the text: imploded universes that don't even need to be unfolded. The magic word is not the result of reduction by data compression. It is not so much what remains after all extraneous wording is deleted. The key word simply presents itself. The magic word does not invite hermeneutics. It unfolds during the writing in the future and needs no historical background in order to operate. The etymology of the magic word often discloses unexptected figures and displays what is taken for granted in everyday language use.
There exists a certain pleasure in thinking of posterity. who may set about deciphering it all – that is not the issue here, Sensible questions about the deeper meaning and coherence will unavoidably lead to new ADILKNO texts. The exegesis of a compact text quickly reaches overload, a particular problem in contemporary text production. Speculation does not look to quality or quantity. but to wonder over the now or never oflhejam session of discourses. It won't make you any richer or wiSer: poorer, rather, since the accidentally compiled soc/pol/cul/eco/hist-ballast gets pulverized during tht' instant consumption of the ADILKNO product. Big connections, eras, entities. themes, moralities and world issues disappear like a snowball in the sun.
The media's unbearable lightness of being does not have to be compensated for by diligent archive labour. ADILKNO is not expressing the fear that the text has one foot in the grave, but joyfully admitting that the media has won. The old-fashioned text is thereby relieved at last of the obligation to mean something else, and may become impossible. The holy Script has become a child's toy at the moment that the media are wrestling with the introduction of the picture text. Pictorialization campaigns for the world population tread the familiar path of crisis, war and other ecstatic moments in order to convince the public at large of the importance of what's going on in the world.
In this rising picture culture the text may, in a severely reduced form, fulfil a supporting function. As subtitle or credit it disappears to the edge, while it flashes in the centre as a rhythmic eye-catcher.
The formulation of ADILKNO texts is drudgery compared to the dimensions of data communication. Although the notes are preferably made in a flush of intoxication, the production time seems endlessly long. Not because such thorough research preceded it or the 'final version' was so long in coming. Deleting, rewriting, improving or discussing is remarkably unpopular among adilknoians and is done only on pain of a whole new story – tis but text. To us The Satanic Verses is not worth a war; words are things and need no reassessment. Which is by definition reactionary. Backward text writers need not think up some artinciallegitimation or pedagogical intent. Hobbyists are simply possessed.
Where there is text, there is ADILtext. It seems excessive to question its usefulness or achievement. The adiltext is the weather report of the European mini-media in which it participates. From out of a marginal corner it gives dubious predictions based on observations done by our local amateurs. The detailed weather prediction delivered by ADILKNO every so often can be found in the neighbourhood of R&TV programming, recommended viewing and media criticism, the cooking show, the cryptogram, the philatelic news, the bridge reports and the comics. ADILKNO is no enfant terrible of opinion formation. It takes no dissident position with regard to the prevailing analyses and has no cultural mission to fulnl. Contact with the audience is by chance and does not have to be maintained by means of a fan club or alternative circuit. ADILKNO does not make use of scandal in order to enter the picture, although it is permanently distorting, undedighting and negatively approaching its subject. and, moreover, gives evidence of nxations on sex, nlth and vermin. The ADILKNO text is difficult. but never leads to misunderstandings about its drift, admissible or otherwise. For ADILKNO the dangerous text about the dangerous subject is played out and ruled out. ADILKNO has a warm interest in all the taboos of the world, but no need to break them. It has no interest in openly flirting with or rehashing yet again the body of thought of the glorious 20's and 30's, which explored borders. depths and heights of Dasein (being) in the era of technology. The deadly angle is removed from the text and cannot be put back. Every ADILKNO text. intentionally or not, begins with this connrmation. It is writing beyond the Cold War. It inspires the beautiful illusion that the comparison between Then and Now no longer holds, and that to write about the present, one can better gamble on there being a vanishing point somewhere in the future of all current developments which are passé beforehand for ADILKNO. Only then does the story begin.

translation LAURA MARTZ