Group X as experimental practice is concerned with forms of organization, modes of distribution of power, strategies and criteria for quality assessment. It is not an expression of experimental X: activities that aim to deterritorialize the body and its thresholds, frequently accompanied by ideological subtexts that regularly tend towards consolidation of Xsual identities rather than the estimated, and marketed, production of new or alternative subjectivities. Group X is not a matter of each individual being responsible for his or her satisfaction. Group X is a matter of giving up ones own immediate satisfaction, which always has a happy ending and is a tragedy, in favor of a pleasure that is bypassing identity and hence proposes a different (in kind) practice of ownership. 

Value, and with that appreciation in all its forms, exists in and as a constant flow or flux, but underneath there is a system, a grid of values that constitute the world and its actions, that act as an alibi for all other flows and fluxes and produce a necessary stability for modes of navigation

Nothing needs order more than an Z. But fuck that, if order can be identified there is certainly no Z. Group X provides circumstances to contest order as we know it. Z and Group X should not be confused. Group X is not about excess or subversive actions, nor concerned with the efficiency or eruptive intensities of spectacle, but rather in an activity known producing a different being together.

Group X is about resolving notions of success, the measurability of ability, criteria for “was it good for you…” and indeed to change the world. How is Group X successful: not because I come, not because we all come, not even at the same time, Group X issues another modality of success that requires other means of assessment: what is the name of those criteria? What matters is not the individual but the success or well being of the assemblage, both as a plane of consistency and as a series of interdependent individuals, whose only concern is the plane.

This implies that the individual can estimate different positions, different modes of activation, possibly changing during a single session, in order to stimulate the plane, which in itself is a shifting and fluctuating entity. Conventional one to one Xual activity is measurable in respect of signs, Group X in contrast can only be evaluated in respect of productive intensity, some sort of volume whose composition conditions and attributes, continuously shift and therefore forces the engaged to produce autonomous capacities for identification, coordination, classification.

It is our responsibility, and opportunity, to take on such practices, which indeed is self-jeopardizing and a departure from consensual and universal notions of X and its relationship to individuality and protocols for identity production, Group X thus being closer to engineering than consolidation. An engineering of abstraction defined as equipment, both tools and lure, linking material and semiotic elements, from non-discursive, un-namable, un-repeatable sets of entry-points, in order to construct political, economic and aesthetic devices where existential transformation can be tested.

Group X implies that the participant has to give him/her self up. This production is not just concerned with the self but with one self as human.

Group X is epic, and it welcomes alienation effects. Isn’t it so that one to one Xuality is measured on the basis of keeping the illusion intact and active? Group X is not following cinematic protocols, it doesn’t support dramaturgy like e.g. a CD – with a strong beginning, middle and end. Group X is more like downloading separate tracks and listening to them with Itunes on shuffle. No Group X is not about X is it about practicing different kinds of coagulations of decision making, models that necessarily must shift considering that there can be no division between life and economy.

Different modes of behavior and expression are represented in Group X and as they spread, which they necessarily must, they produce skills or collective bodies of expertise. Those bodies, these skills, as soon as they are in operation, trigger instead of a hoped for climax and its aftermath, a proliferation of problems, desires and responses.

Group X is not a vertical and hierarchical organization, nor is it a network, based on models of patchwork that allows individuals and Groups to operate in a more flexible and responsible way. Rather it is yet a different organization which is modulator or amorphous on the level of form and structural consistency, i.e. it is not operating due structure, discipline and is not long term, but is instead organized due flows and fluxes. It is a coagulation of decisions rather than a skeleton that simplifies decision-making.

On the other hand, Group X, is not an organism (it is not hierarchical) and it is not a swarm – that would be too sad. It is not atomic and it is not a multitude. It is rather not a metaphor, but it is a landscape – however the metaphor does not continue. It is a landscape on the level of formation, but on the level of the individual it is strongly stabilized. On the level of expression the individual and the Group must proceed very carefully, and there are even certain formal responsibilities to consider. Group X transposes difference, from different in degree but not in kind, to different in kind but not in degree.

On the level of expression Group X is long term, striated and non-dynamic. Group X in respect of organization is changing direction – in this situation, it is not the organization that works for the individual, but the individual working for the organization. Group X is not an organization but a coagulation without a centre or skeleton. It is an abstract machine in relation to a particular set of behaviors forming an ethics through concrete rules.

Group X in this respect is not counter productive to given and established politics. It does not oppose given systematics, but formulate a no to given modes of engagement. Group X is not something else but an incompatible addition. Group X does not arrest it’s position to be either pacified or to be given a position as outside which both would consolidate the given. Instead Group X function as an irritation on the body of organization, it is a post-identitairian practice, that carries the potentiality of a different life.

extracts of a text written by Marten Spangberg (original has been modified: one word has been replaced by the lettre X)

What kind of picture do you get from this text? What do you imagine reading this?