MANIFESTOS

HOMEOSTETICS
Le soi-disant
Genital organ of the neo-cannibal movement
0
NEO-CANNIBAL PROCLAMATION
I
HOMEOSTETIC MANIFESTO
II
A COUNTRY BUMPKIN IN NEW YORK
III
A COUNTRY BUMPKIN IN NEW YORK (B version)
IV
OH, IF THERE WERE WHALES IN PORTIMÃO
V
SPARTAN EDUCATION
VI
ON THE STRUGGLE OF THE HOMEOSTETIC WAR
VII
MANIFESTO
VIII
MARMOREAL ODEON
OR
(POSTHUMOUS MANIFESTO EVOKING AGE-OLD WORRIES)
IX
F.B. MANIFESTO
X
THE ANAEMIA OF PAINTING
XI
INFRACRYPTOGRAPHIC
XII
PARA-HERMENEUTICS
XIII
THE PRIME MINISTER’s WAN-TANS
MANIFESTO ON THE STATE OF THE NATION
 XIV
“LES ANIMACULES HOMEOSTHÉTIQUES”
XV
CONTINENTS
XVI
FROM CROCODILE ISLANDS
XVII
SOME THOUGHTS FROM OUR WISE GURU
BUDONGUIAN NIRVANAS
AND SUBTLETIES
XVIII
RED-HAIRED ANXIETIES
XIX
NATIONAL CULTURE
 HOMEOSTETICS

Le soi-disant

Genital organ of the neo-cannibal movement

First version written prior to 5/5/1982

(Revised version, April 2003)

Converted into the so-called Homeostetic movement

My dear inhuman brothers: the main escape-route from the current aesthetic-
technical-artistic impasse resides (due to your supremely sweet secret agitation) in
physis (commonly known as natura), this spectrum of faecality (defecationism-
abjectionism) that the laws of thermodynamics place in ebullition as a simmering pulp
in the outskirts of the outskirts

What is physis ((natura desnaturata))?

We could say: it is confusion in the classification and categorization of exceptions, i.e.,

the movement on which Heraclitus sleeps during his slumbers of heroic manure!

I would never define (and I mean never!) art other than a variant of armchair definitions
that dared precede our own. We dare to create our own timid precursors by placing
bombs beneath their sweet statues!

So I pass the buck to artephysis! (?)

And what is artephysis?

The animal-vegetable-erogenous zone of contemplation, wherein lies all creation (in its
glorious expanse, worthy to be filmed by Cecil B. de Mille)?
The gland where complexity finds its primordial or genetic image with a vine leaf to
cover its Adamic exhibitionism, given that Eva has nothing to hide?

Is this primordial image a form of neo-complexity? Is it reorganisation? Is it fraud? Is it

a vaguely neo-nazi conspiracy? Or is it a good Franciscan intention, with fleas to
boot?
Some people would say: pure fiction! Why not? Artephysis is a concretization of arte-
fiction, a metaphor whose image is aesthetic socialism (in a version of philosophical-
ecological phalanstery!); he thus finds repose through change (Heraclitus again and
again and again).
Artephysis is the ripe fruit of the most third-rate pretentiousness that ends up
becoming nice and digestible, perfectly adapted to a society of misfits.

It implodes in polygenetic, chaotic-genetic and lottery-genetic meta-catastrophes.

Perhaps it is the superstructure (honest to God?) that will be superseded by the poly-
structure (now you’re talking!)!

It is Civilisation (with its propensity for denial) that breaks down into interacting
civilisational foci filled with good intentions (Amen!)!

It is collective individualisation (the end of fashion?) processed at a multi-layered and

hyper-complex level (rebirth of local, comical latrines in hilarious mutual dialogue?),
rather than the standardizing individualization of the passive consumer in the era of
levelling globalization (wow!).

Or even the inflation of inflection (a growing number of breakpoints and diversionary

manoeuvres within a mass rally, where café-vans are selling sandwiches!)?

Genuine artephysis (undomesticated and homeosteticated nature) is the product of

two clinical cases as follows:
a) Cruelty: cruelty is intuition (Bolshevik-Kantian) in its state of a productive war
machine. Creation implies transformation and thus implies destruction, without any
form of condescension, of all dunderhead forms that crush vitalist expansionism!
b) Fraternity: fraternity is the instrumental sharing of creative flows. Deep, deep down
we are all children of a Demiurge, of some form or another. Brothers, as I said above
(paraphrasing Villon) we are inumanos, ma non troppo!

These form the bases of an organic neo-demography with dangerously transcendental

appetites (ask Pedro Portugal!).

Beauty with need (or predatory tendencies) plays a major role within this programme.
It is cause and effect, alpha and omega, boorish revolution and chic reactionism (corsi
e ricorsi).

This point corresponds not only to a procedural need, which is homeostetic in its own
right, but also to an outright homeostetic victory.

Return to a descent into the Infernos, to lingering in the Purgatories and to revelry in
the Paradises and culminating in a glorious anti-cybernetic resurrection (prefigured in
God’s descent into Flesh).

This path of enquiry presupposes the reformulation of language by means of metabolic

focusing (interactive nuclearisation): neo-cannibalism at its purest, oh what beauty!

Having ended barbarity, history is suppressed and substituted by generous myths

suitable for children and other misfits.

Meaning will no longer reside in function of Time, but instead of Eternity (of which time
is only a fleeting image: the Archetype will become concrete, a building that is difficult
to destroy, but an excellent target for terrorist attacks).

Simplification, as an open prairie of conceptual galloping, will be considered a childish

illness of outdated forms of totalitarianism.

Science will pay greater attention to the epidermic - gnostic phenomenon (bohu-tatoo),
especially in terms of its harmless mimetic strategies.

Anal, umbilical and guttural instruction will create natural aptitudes for the vulgarisation
of ecstasy and mystic-mathematical illuminations!
This process begins in the finite eye-glass of the body, the anus! The (camouflaged!)
personalisation of faecality (significantly) leads us, ultimately, to Absolute
Complexification i.e. to the flowery abyss of pre-gymno-genetic forces.

The bio-poly-communicative systems will activate the inter-galactic hominid

slumbering within humanus vulgaris.

In this manner, cannibalism (or anthropophagy) is the correct metaphor for the
network of devouring exchanges between such hominids and their ETHOS.

It is true that autophagy has dignified the role of access to emptiness, to the plexus, to
nirvana, but if we relied solely on this strategic deviation it would hardly be very
enriching!

To cannibalise the modus-nudus operandi: is our underlying thesis!

From pro-vocation to evacuation,

From peripheries to centralising forces,

From asceticism to delicacies,

Homeostetics converts and initiates.

 Neo-Cannibal Proclamation

Art is INTENDED for the Hunters of HUMAN FLESH

It is
A frenetic state of captivation

“Gnawing on a bone if possible

is the Portuguese dream of the good life”
(Jorge de Sena)

Eating (preferably human flesh)

Is the foundation of any possibility.
Refusing autophagy
(what will be the flavour of that which we already know)
we propose amorous voracity
because man loves
above all and everything
HIS FELLOW CREATURE

To eat, To err, To defecate

Aureal Disorder
United to PLEASANT ORDER
The Act of Creation presupposes
either
a bucolic inferno
or
an unsustainable paradise

Our starting point is a magnificent sociological situation:

1. no-money. Our country is generically poor without being too poor. We lie on the
boundaries of the rich and little else. We are treated with a due level of disrespect,
without resentment, by those who own capital. Our future does not look very rosy.
2. art consumption (importation). We import as much as we can, and badly, and we
export next to nothing. Due to the lack of a national market or institutions with
vision (although some have genuine capacity), we import models from abroad
without taking time to digest them. We participate in the legitimisation of the cultural
imperialism that accompanies economic colonialism.
State colonialism has ended, with obvious advantages for the ex-colonialists, who
continue their business dealings without the inconvenience of having to associate
with the masses: full-time dedication.

3. Low level of production. We produce very little because we are bunch of Moors
and Southerners. But so were the Greeks and the Renaissance Italians! So we
have no excuse. Our low level of productivity derives from a lack of enthusiasm
best typified by the Fado and the sweet nostalgia of the Saudade. Idle leisure is
good for the soul and is the father of many things, but shouldn’t be confused with
inertia.

4. Difficulty in admitting influences. Originality only exists in the minds of vulgar

people. Originality only becomes truly original when all influences have been
properly digested. In order for this to happen, we must be open to so-called
influences. Finally, we must have the courage, little by little, to rid ourselves of such
influences. Any innovator harbours a wealth of influences.

We do exactly the opposite. We drift. We allow economic impossibilities to occur

astutely. We ensure that chance is never left to chance. That minds pull together
and unite. Without clarification there is no room for innocence. Neo-cannibalism
proposes a history before history began, an art that dispenses with the need for
industry. Hyper-cultish work for the masses. Without fear of egocentricities or
insolence!
Why not?

February 1982
 I
HOMEOSTETIC MANIFESTO

We dress ourselves with the mathematical clothes of illuminated despotism as we

launch crises into oblivion, closed within a central fraternity, in a space and time
that has been constructed and deconstructed for our habitation and transgression;
organising while disorganising, more or less in an exhibitionistic manner, allowing
our bodies to be seen or re-seen, as they narcissistically dive into the labyrinths of
our own image, in a mirror that is uncontrollably transcended simultaneously with
the object that is therein reflected.

Chaos exists in the centre of such things, it is one of the intimate god-machine-
methods, an active and inactive confusion: a cold passion that lies more or less in
waiting.

But who ever dreams of a perfect and intact order?

Whether or not to count upon Utopias: a mere question of tactics.

And what is Homeostetics? An absurd question filled with taxis, caviar,

pocketbooks and arsenic...

Making all gestures flow towards a Immediate-Unique-One, or build a light/heavy

weight manufacturer-god, an artisanal god or a plurality of gods, sacred and
implacable, making god and his cathedral flows towards the manufacture: may the
mountains move to visit the prophets!

Everything begins in the orifices.

First the festive ritual of catharsis: to bite, to yelp, to contain, to involve; followed by
ceasing involvement.
This is achieved paradoxically. With the fingernails filled with black and white
humour, in a maximalist-minimalist act and vice-versa: in this case, we are left
perplexed by the scale because it is filled with incoming and outgoing flows, inside-
outside in movement.

Regression and progress in humanity, in infancy: wallowing in the fraternity with

revolutionary crimes; but the project is always the same – to reveal the New City.

In this manner the powers-that-be reveal themselves as un-revealable, in luxurious

intimacies and exaggerated pantomimes, without frenetic sentimentalisms and in
nostalgic memories of opiates, with binoculars focused on the beyond.
The uniform makes the soldier, but the label only completes the homeostetic.

The Homeostetic is a wise and absolute creature, conscious of his genius. The
roads of his excess lead him to the palace of wisdom. The limit between the
dragged and the dragger (magnetic fact) is the infinite-here.
Revolution, politics, regressivity, solidarity and the individualis me, they love us
profoundly:
oh to be a hero, crazy, cursed or Beautiful!

Pedro Proença, 1983

in a pamphlet for the “Homeostetics” exhibition, ESBAL Exhibition Hall, May 26 to
June 9, 1983
 II
A COUNTRY BUMPKIN IN NEW YORK

A few thoughts of Mickey M.

On the Yankee morality

– the octopus and the duck-billed platypus

Ernesto, the honest duck-billed platypus, passed beneath the apartment belonging
to Sharkey, the brutish octopus.

– hey octopus, said the duck-billed platypus, I’d like to be an invertebrate just like
you…

– Pooh!, replied the octopus with a yawn.

Moral of the story

TILT!!!

Manuel João Vieira, 1984

 III
A COUNTRY BUMPKIN IN NEW YORK (B version)

A country bumpkin in New York? Who can capture the labyrinthine marvels of this
sentence? What alchemical sorcery? What can (in the public’s mind) establish a
link between the signifier and the signified? A sign? It is precisely on this point that
Dr. X is going to talk to us (since he preferred to present a homeotypical
homeostetic).
– “we need to create a myth!”

Will we be the bearers and eternal defenders of this cause of deft, well-crafted and
Promethean poetry? (and for an identical situation, even if situated in another
dimension, we decipher the noble “Banderillas” of our dearly departed Eça de
Queirós).

What is the raison dʼêtre of all this?

It is:
warlike
prophetic
fairylike
mythical
wonderful
magnificent
chimerical!

(...)

The motorways inter-cross like spaghetti. Fine but nauseous buildings open out
when they touch the ground. Inside an elevator, a girl devours the mirror. Back to
the daily grind!

The people of Cape Verde organise a green-spitting competition. The inner part of
the shoulder-blade lies lifeless after so many eons in love with the meat-saw! The
meat-saw? It’s a symbol, like a hairbrush with a turtle-shell handle.
To hell with majorettes! Our friend eats a hamburger in Pimp’s, the waitress has
big boobs and my moustache is dripping with tomato sauce. The jungle! The
labyrinth! The streets and the subterranean corridors! What a beautiful city! In one
corner, a group of pigs devour a cogwheel.

The veins on the hoer’s face appear to be about to burst with Saint Elmo’s Fire.
The man desperately wields his centrifuging machine, so as to squeeze some
carrot juice, the sea-gulls are losing their plumage and the city is accruing purple-
red tones. A large bottle slowly glides over the plastic surface of the kitchenette
and Mickey M. pauses in his requested speech, his concertina filled with rumours
and cockroaches.

(...)

(dragging:)
but why should we unveil
the fine work (of art)
if this would be an unfortunate venture
(or even)
only advisable for consecrated
poets (the eternals)
It’s modern
It’s old hat
It’s a tambourine
It’s a roast duck (1)

(1) – Homeofrenetic parties with an air of lucid, languid, calm and ferocious
debauchment.

We aim, through the drunken state of our lucid discourse, to irremediably

undermine the impure soul of the vulgar art observer and the condescendence of
PEOPLE (animalistic artistic sentiment).
Each artistic work should be a mirror of Alice for the member of the general public.

We nurse our hopes... what hope!!!... what certainty!!! That this quixotic family will
grow fatter and transform into Bacchus and from Bacchus into Saturn etc. and
finally (in Aesculapius) into the all-powerful Zeus!

Do you believe, hallowed public, that our cruel anxieties will transform, as with
everything, into a partner of the eternal national latrine?

No, my fellow Portuguese!

Because we are our own
Gods!

Manuel João Vieira, 1983

 IV
OH, IF THERE WERE WHALES IN PORTIMÃO

A spear in the Algarve.

Homeostetics – a name that makes us dream.
Homeostetics, the test tube baby of modern art.

The present day chimeras do not interest to us or (what we) love, everything is
Biblical. Sex, amiose, the sea, hunger, our art is (mag) the mirror of Alice.

The profoundly childish meaning, and a perfectly fanatical adoration, which at the
same time is sadomasochistic (for) or purely impressionistic in relation to natural
forces, for example: the sea, rocks, baby chickens, unicorns and mermaids.

Pedro Proença, 1984

 V
SPARTAN EDUCATION

HOMEOSTETIC INVOLVEMENT

POST-PARADOXOLOGICAL
INFRA-CRYPTOGRAPHIC
AND TRANSMENNIPEIC

METIS—KAIROS—ENTHOUSIASMOUS

6=O
THE UNIVERSE IS A CUBE
IN DOXA EST PARADOXA

1. Post-paradoxological, because paradoxologies are still based on a collection of

formulae and categorisations that translate tyrannical glory in another form;
irrespective of whether or not this strays from the canons of the digital system.

2. Infra-cryptographic, because the system of deciphering and bug-tapping has

only scraped the tip of the iceberg, restricted to the surface of written texts and
allowing the rumour of entrails to decompose within its archaic litter.

3. Transmenipeic, because we enter into an age that ventures into the space left
between that which has not been de-sacralised; the only space in which one can
still laugh, since laughter is not therein inscribed.

Pedro Proença, 1986

 VI
ON THE STRUGGLE OF THE HOMEOSTETIC WAR

Is the apocalypse near at hand?

Behind us, in the distant mountains, fantastic yellow clouds appear. Lights.
Is God furious with mankind? This afternoon I’m going for a walk with my cow in a
country setting.
The enigmas sprouted forth, numbered and always powerful. They dance
sarcastically.
Here come the extra-terrestrials, some would say! But the flock follows the path, in
the subterranean depths.
The sphinx is beautiful, serene and terrible -
“Do I make an effort in order to think sufficiently about things?” ponders the
interlocutor (the artist?).
The new Freudian imagetics:
The good old symbols reveal us:
“elementary, my dear Watson!”.
And mysticism? The saturnine sciences, the tenebrous wonders, the alchemical
perfume, always impossible, of Frankenstein-esque mathematicians…
What can we learn from fine geometric forms?
... there must be some purity at the bottom of all this?…

Thais! Women are queens, they possess magnificent castles (palaces?). The spy
hides in their submersed parts.
Why don’t I like anything?
Is it futile?

The paradox is constant and leads us nowhere - a product of the malaise of our
times.

Manuel João Vieira, 1983

 VII
MANIFESTO

Due to external interferences, we will only be able to disclose this manifesto to the
general public much later than would otherwise be desirable. We are fully aware
that our disclosure will signal the ultimate death certificate of the art of a generation
that appears to us as the rotten fruit of the cold war. But war is war!

Blackberry concubines
Of wrinkled forget-me-nots
Delicate paraffin
Blossoming in your prairies!

That’s quite enough resisting temptation! Will no-one rid us of evil! It’s common
knowledge amongst the degenerate public that very little is now capable of
displacing them from their electric whisks and the mass media! Caput! That is our
new slogan! Oh for the prairies where we ride on buffalo to the sound of limpid
dung!

Our heroes? We remember Attila the Hun, Cleopatra, fresh and succulent meat
skewers, with butter melting on the immaculate flesh of spider-crabs! Adventure,
barbecued lamb, crazy, uncontrolled boy-scouting!

We are a rude movement, undisciplined like a snowball rolling down a mountain of

manure! Yes, we are chaos! But limpid chaos in its primeval, ordered form! Raw
chaos!

Down with synthetic food additives! Why not nurture livestock in apartments and
light bonfires at night, while feasting and drinking ancient-flavoured wines?

We need to mete out iron justice to this anaemic society! Decapitate “The Fox and
the Hound”!

That is our desire. Slowly, progressively fattening, the homeostetic movement will
impose its superior moral philosophy over this stagnant and canned filth, a new
model of chaos, of clarity, a natural morality, currently pre-pubescent, but tomorrow
a hairy beast.

Manuel Vieira
 VIII
MARMOREAL ODEON
OR
(POSTHUMOUS MANIFESTO EVOKING AGE-OLD WORRIES)

Before Ancient Greece, art was a commercial entrepôt associated to the powers of
the non-visible. Such trade with divinity and adjacent demons became so
discredited that the main concern of artists in the classical era was exclusively
concentrated on the visible world.
To portray the visible world, its illusions and other mumbo-jumbo. This paradigm,
which is repeated in the Renaissance and always remained within the sights of
artists (and that nobly constituted the art of photography) is the flip side of the
philosophical paradigm. Hence the satire by our esteemed Plato when he
compared the artist to a third-class copier, a passive being.

Sculpture began its emancipation from the Egyptian model with the Kouroi. These
figures of death are not intended for death, frozen within their pyramidical hieratic
outlook. Instead they are posthumous erections of the laughing corpse. Luciano
configures death as a place of burlesque dialogues, where laughter always
appears as an exorcism of death itself and as polymorphic sexualisation of the
living and their poor Nomes. The subterranean laughter emerging from the
advances (through daring) of these important boys and girls prefigures the Being
and its tautological impossibility, and returns in this century in the form of Dadaism,
a place between Art and Anti-Art.

Hellenistic painting, which was as much Greek as it was Roman, along with
Romanesque prose, reveals itself as narrative and is not afraid of copying. If what
we can see today is mainly copies, they reveal an excellence that philosophy was
unable to reach, because philosophy quickly became a slave of its own legitimacy,
and its repetition, even with nobility, bears the stamp of “parrot-style repetition”. It
was necessary to wait 20 centuries before Jesuit neo-subjectivism renewed itself in
a decisive manner with Descartes. Whether or not Descartes erred in his
reasoning, he was no different from other philosophers. It was simply that the
philosophical machine found an unexpected second wind. In other words, it
discovered new perspectives that would keep it busy for several centuries.
Painting and rhetoric would like to be convincing, staying on the side of the
Sophists, who have remained forgotten and ridiculed until the present day. A
painting, as an ingenious machine of fantasy and illusion, never ceases to affirm its
delight in artifice and its association with the appearances of appearances. From
Apeles to Leonardo what counts is the simulation of plausible space. If a certain
realism frequently triumphed to the detriment of the abysmal attraction of the
fantastic, the latter, in its taste for paradox, often allied itself to lesser genres. The
grotesque and its metamorphic derision often arises as a threat (or mirage) of non-
being. As a result it is relegated to the margins, as if it contained no meaning, as if
it affirmed an image that persists in the fleeting image of that which neither exists
nor has anything to affirm or prove.

There is however a Greece of our own – of a disseminated or ruined origin. An

origin that neither wishes to rebuild nor unify, where the Gods walk hand-in-hand.
Gods that are no longer terrible and no longer serve any purpose. Gods, that as a
result of successive trivialisations, constituted the decorative apparatus of the XVIII
century. Such securalisation coincided with a renewed importance placed on the
little things in life.

But this Greece which is not Greece, but which is born from her at every moment,
is reminiscent of Virgil’s Arcadia and the ruins of Prophecy. It is a pleasant
landscape that invites intelligent contemplation, where shepherds discourse with
philosophers. The landscapes of Claude Gelée and Poussin. They appear rustic,
but it is the concept that endows them with either their quietude or inquietude: ET
IN ARCADIA EGO. The sentiment of mortality is the synonym of the desire of
appeasement.

That’s why it was necessary to invent other Greeces. The Greece of Hegel and
Hölderlin. The Greece of Nietzsche, which is not Greece but a babble of
approximations. Heidegger’s tautological Greece with his etymological digressions
in which Being trembles in his game of hide-and-seek. Archaeology also undertook
to forge new Greeces. The Roman Greeces of Herculaneum and Pompey and the
labyrinthine Greeces which existed prior to the Greece of Crete. It has also been
claimed that Troy was ultimately more of a phantasm than a culture.
The Hellenists changed a great deal in function of philosophers and anthropology.
They discovered rational and irrational Greeces. The philosophers also began to
change in function of the Hellenists.
Greece after Burcket or Vernant, after Dods or Cassin has not yet rediscovered
itself in plastic terms. Why not? Because Greece was one of the most frequent
forms of legitimisation. The recourse to myth was a sign of the erudition or
astuteness of an artist. But his interpretation of such matters was often aimed at
other goals.

There are pictorial exceptions in the confrontation with Hellenism: Piero di Cosimo,
Ticiano and Poussin.

Neo-Platonism introduced the Idea, either via Plotino, or Mannerism.

But who are our intellectual masters? Heraclitus, the Sophists, the Cynics and New
Sophistry, in particular Luciano. If Heraclitus installed the mobile element, together
with modest chastity, the Sophists proposed an art of playful denial, of pure game-
playing, in which Kairos, as a stroke of genius using a Techné, plays a
fundamental role. Kairos is the creative element, Chance that becomes evident
through fortuitous association. The Cynics ridiculed the apparatus of legitimisation,
i.e. to destroy the desire to please or displease that the Sophists considered so
essential. But as with the teachings of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, the forms of
engagement or renunciation of the world are paradoxical. As a result, the true cynic
does not take cynicism literally, just as the true Sophist is more interested in
discovering new arguments or in talking for the sake of talking rather than ceding to
institutions or protectors.

Why don’t we return to Crete, given that few echoes of its plasticity have been
found? In Cretan art, the mobile element, or Poikilos, is more evident than in any
other era or style. Its delicate and precious pulpous and marine motifs seem to
echo in these rare fragments that which we dare to define as Manueline. Tales’
“Water” marries itself with Apeiron’s knotty “Anaximandro”.

When, five decades ago, Callois referred to mimicry and Crete in the same book he
was establishing an interface between both, thus rendering Crete and mimicry
more explicit. Now it is exactly the determinations of mimicry, mime, imitation and
illusion that caused Greece to diverge. From the chameleon to the praying mantis,
passing through a pure condition of travesty, Greece constituted its topics and
dissidences, which became progressively more explicit and chimerical.

Today we are probably far more Greek in our lives, in our respectable and wafer-
thin fifth generation of Dadaism, in terms of our desire to attain limitless
syncretisms, to create unfettered knowledge, to respond for the sake of
responding, to consider history as a private undertaking rather than a nationalist or
pseudo-internationalist hypocrisy. History is not destined to serve as a form of
proof or example, offering a morality of tales that cost lives. We appropriate history
for our own from the moment in which we remake our own lives, in which it
becomes real. It therefore makes perfect sense to say: history is the marriage of all
fashion, in its singularity, syncretism and true potential. History is the morphology
that enriches our plenitude!

Pedro Proença, 1989

 IX
F.B. MANIFESTO

THE DRIVING FORCE OF HOMEOSTETICS IS INTOLERANCE: WE DON’T

THINK – WE KNOW.
OUR COMPETITION WASTES TIME THINKING AND WE OVERTAKE THEM
DURING THEIR PAUSES. SPECTACULARLY. ALWAYS.

NOTHING TO UNDERSTAND
EVERYTHING TO ADORN

BUDONGA IS THE HOMEOSTETIC GOD, WHOSE RELIGION IS ALSO CALLED

BUDONGA.
BUDONGA IS EVERYWHERE.
HE CAN DO EVERYTHING
HE KNOWS EVERYTHING
SO: IF 6=0, BUDONGA=999

HOMEOSTETICS – AVANTE-GARDE ELITE? OR ELITIST AVANTE-GARDE?

THE HOMEOSTETIC MOVEMENT IS A CULTURAL AND RECREATIONAL

ASSOCIATION WITH HUMANITARIAN GOALS: TO SAVE THE NATION
CULTURALLY

PEOPLE ARE NOT USED TO THINKING, WE HAVE TO THINK FOR THEM. IT’S
A TOUGH, THORNY AND UNGRATEFUL TASK.

FIGURES OF HOMEOSTETIC ARCHITECTURE: TRIUMPHAL ARCHES,

SUSPENSION BRIDGES, OBELISKS, EVOCATIVE PYRAMIDS, OLYMPIC
STADIUMS, BEACONS.
BUDONGUIAN SEXUALITY – THE THIRD SEXUALITY.

SPARTAN EDUCATION (F. Brito)

Fernando Brito, 1985

 X
THE ANAEMIA OF PAINTING

Art has once again been invaded by the anaemia of painting.

Nefarious Gestures repeat themselves, Nietzcheian rhetoric corrupts our spirits
and our thinking inhabits a luxuriant Narcissistic calm in silver-lined, violet, convex
euthanasia.
Who cares about fading red roses?
Death to Painting, it’s a can of worms! (XANA)
Idolatry and the mechanisms that preside over the Abstract Pose are the enemies
of trans-utopias determined by homeostetic progress.
(For such enemies, our warlike brigade will unleash the most merciless
persecutions, the most lascivious tortures, the most debauched executions!)
Art today is championed by guerrillas, through war against the art market and
exhibition of the corpses of rancorous art-dealers in the city square (Rato, Chiado,
Rossio) to the aesthetic delight of the multitude of flies.
Oh how sweet is their buzzing next to the venomous aroma!
Art = Guerilla = People – the artist is the veritable trigger of the Revolution rather
than just a juicy metaphor (such as “my pen is a plough, my brush is a cannon”).
For us the crash and dissonance of the avante-garde, the vertigo of decimating the
automatic, puffed up fraud of the bourgeois, and his most contradictory/typical
representative: The Painter!

Proença

January 1986
 XI
INFRA-CRYPTOGRAPHIC

The Right Angle protects us against catastrophe

a) All falling is a (d)effect of vision

b) All debts are an economic trompe-l’œil
Thus
There is no blemish, nor marks, nor traces, nor erasures.
Finally: there is no writing (or inscription)
Which is like saying: there is nothing.
This path is the inverse/symmetrical image of all forms of nihilism.
Designation of the absurd is a form of mental gymnastics, I mean, a discreet form
of common sense.
The important thing is to determine Being as an absence of feelings and Non-Being
as an uncontrollable metaphorical predatory act.
OF GENERALISED CONTRA-INDUCTION
(2 manifesto-notes!)

(1985/86?)

Generalised contra-induction (theory of elementary frauds)

Reactive strategies (op-position)

Falsificationist strategies
Repetitive strategies
Constructive strategies (elemental)
De-constructive strategies
Syncretic strategies
Comparative strategies
Semiological strategies

To determine op-positions in relation to the context of production through

categorisation. When the context is pluralist, to trace the boundaries of contextual
components.
Falsify, mimic, ridicule, devaluate (the great act of copying), de-legitimate, parody.
Obsession: create hubs of expression, foci of attention.
Establish hierarchies on the basis of the elemental.
De-complexification without recourse to the elemental. Only disassembly exists
(like the child who breaks apart watches, toys, cars).
Mix and match: style (historic) seen as sequence (Kubler and Bateson). An
assembly of in-sequences (Egyptian style + Chinese style, Indian art + Abstract
expressionism, Rupestrian painting + naïve painting, pop art + mannerism). Even
more specific examples: Caravaggio as a disciple of Roy Lichtenstein, Giotto living
in India during the Guptian period, Fidias for the 1990s, etc. Creation of unrealities,
of fictional contexts. Or situations such as “how I would have painted the Mona
Lisa, how I would have filmed Taboo, etc.”.
Eclecticism: articulation of various languages.
Plans of meaning / plans of production of differences.
The constant return of history as the “non-historisable” (it’s all a question of
availability?”).

Values of falsification. Fraud.

A thought of suspension (unfounded, meteoritic).

Conceptual art as a typically metaphysical product.

Against novelty and difference at all costs (What Novelty? What Difference?).
Against standardisation (against aesthetics that are too well founded).

Fraud and Simulacrum: mimicry.

Art for the people / art for the elites.

Weakening of the notion of truth, weakening (and proliferation) of categories,

weakening of oppositions (weakening of “excellence”, of “reason”).

The post-paradoxological state: of double-bind to unrealisation. Non-cruelty.

The effects of secularisation. Rhetoric masturbation as a form of reaction.

Citations – The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Speaking about: complete works of art such as the grand triptychs and the
cathedrals.
Speaking about the “refusal” to theorise as a form of dissuasion. Theory is
secretism.

Ne me demandez pas pourquoi.

Laughter? Derision? Means “transmenippeia”!

Fraud? Concealment? “ Infra-cryptographic”!

History of Homeostetics. Simulation of meaning (Homeostatics/Homeostetics:

Derrida’s difference/differance)

Metis/Kairos/Enthousiasmous

6=0 (cubic universe)

(black notebook)

Generalised contra-induction

Imagine a very simply method

Reactive strategies (i.e., do the opposite of what you are doing, of what an “in
vogue” artist is doing, or what has been done throughout the long archaeology of
the History of Art).
Constructive strategies (i.e., to determine “closed” idiomatic styles on the basis of
simple articulated rules (Sol Lewitt). Effect of playing games. Requires the
definition of interdictions.
Deconstructive strategies (dismantlement of pre-existing structures, forms and
games).
Semiological strategy (attempt to articulate idiomatic styles on the basis of an idea
of “plans aimed at the production of differences” that will be simple plans.
Syncretic strategy (mixture of styles, etc. Reproduction, copying, poorly reproduced
eclecticism, kitsch, etc.).

Establish an absurd system of classification of art in order to define contra-

inductive practises on the basis of formal plans.
Examples

Iconoclast/Figural
Expressionist/Formalist
Round/Angular

(difficulty in establishing oppositions)

Je est un Autre/ J'ai un Notre

Pedro Proença, 1986

 XII
PARA-HERMENEUTICS

If hermeneutics retraces the lost/obscure sense (that dubious metaphor) and

derives from an awareness of this loss/obscuration and the canine fidelity to a
mystic bride (Oh Jerusalem!), para-hermeneutics, through error, through delirium,
through proximity, through enjoyment or even through stupidity, composes a fluid
meaning, a problematic web of connections, a flow of errors, abductions that may
be made to fit reality like a glove, if so required.

These interpretations are one of the new bestiaries of a monstrous fauna. Para-
hermeneutics simply requires dynamic plasticity. The truth that is thereby
unleashed is like false ceilings filled with junk. The game of blind man’s buff
reaches mistaken truth through groping, but, however mistaken it may be, it
nonetheless has the consistence of truth.

Interpretation is not the sole objective of para-hermeneutics. When the latter

unearths an object it is sufficiently intelligent to never even dream of thinking that it
is close to something obscure. It is probably pulling away, retreating into the
shadows. But isn’t the forward-march the same as retreating?

Well! Some people say that there is another model to advance towards the Truth,
i.e., to invent it, to construct it, to create or deform reality in order that it may
thereby be adjusted. There is also the extrepretation, the violent seizure, of little
consequence today but fatal tomorrow, with the seizure of Europa and other similar
abductions. No copies or simulacrums. Interpretation still takes care to connect and
weave, like a tarantula, the tenebrous threads to which the victim slowly succumbs.

Truth always causes victims, whether we like it or not! In extrepretation there is

pillaging and temples set light with torches or bombs! Such destructive work! Time,
the great destroyer, twitches its hungry mandibles, the wild laughter of gluttons
(hey presto?) shatters conclusive pretensions, and something escapes, deviates,
breaking the siege of interpretative armies. Philology, with all its inner love, always
repeats its declarations, just like philosophy that is pure and simply incapable of
raging against wisdom. Both philology and philosophy hold the channels of good
taste and show their understanding, and are sometimes highly tolerant with
extrepretive cannibalisms, but as a rule they display a hypocritical and conformist
disdain, of total submission to a nitpicking society that prefers eclecticism to
syncreticism due to the mania of national, regional or individual identity. We prefer
acculturation, importation, colonialism, and an obsession with the exotic,
fashionable and picturesque.

In any form of abduction there is a fundamental blindness, a hasty translation, a

sudden mimicry that dissipates with the recognition that it is nothing more than a
ridiculous copy, an enchanting illusion (“Helen”, always Helen, transformed into
Sophia, as performed by Simon, the Magus).

In order to abduct we require a certain level of astuteness and persistence,

because, in the words of Almada, we must allow ourselves to be abducted by the
Other!

Pedro Proença, 1986

 XIII
THE PRIME MINISTER’s WAN-TANS
MANIFESTO ON THE STATE OF THE NATION

Good-bye Boris! – said the smuggler

Into what is the homeostetic transforming himself?

Into a cybernetic homossexual?
Or is he falling (as with everything) into a standardised product of contemporary
industry?

Yes, Joe, the ones we seek are not here. How about a tequila to cool the cockles
of our hearts?

Homeostetic Drama is the drama of Sanctity: how to remain pure in this post-
modern operetta filled with hygienic sex (mental-mind and in practise: a bit like
coitus interruptus while stopping to clean our teeth and a punctured condom to
boot) and remote-controlled (from Mars, of course!). Of exquisite art galleries with
gallery owners that DON’T go to bed with their artists, plus the sordid world of
sleazy pick-ups until the dawn? How can we remain pure? In other words, integral
and even more, like Wagnerian heroes or the fools of the round table?

Look at these jerks pretending they’re cool as shit, Frank!

Don’t repeat that, Joe, it isn’t a bit funny!
These idiots are really asking for it, inspector, but the Law is the Law!
The only road (the one inscribed inside the lobotomised brain) is the one that leads
to Paradise.
In what kind of sanctity is our ultra-commercial movement swimming?

The Answer may be: a PORTUGUESE SANCTITY OF COURSE!

HOMEOSTETICS prostrates itself in a state of prayer: a religious, phlegmatic

covering (in plain English: praying-mantis): here the male devours the female after
the sex act and what’s more his testicles have teeth.

It is also a venomous GURU, like Timothy Leary: who pedagogically drags the
masses towards an immediate nirvana, without gymnastic nuisances.

A theorist of the diaspora: in this case it consults the rabbi and has already carried
out the mental circumcision between TORA and FREUD. It is everywhere and
dreams of returning (with a bit of luck) to the promised land.

A dogmatic paradoxologist: which is, at the very least, logical.

A ridiculous new state, that has inherited from the Estado Novo, only the façade of
half a dozen good constructions and second-rate rhetorics. Monumentalism
tailored to suit the Portugal of the Little People.

A depraved orientalist who looks at sanscrit dictionaries with his eyes focused on
Kajuraho’s static debauchery.

How were the babes?

Pretty hot?
Damn right! Shame
they were dead!

Macho-menism Never Again, April 25 for ever!

OH!

Abysmal dramas are a thing of the past. The deluge was a political metaphor to
wash dirty linen. It was never even slightly amusing.

Phew!!

The saint watches all this, with serene indifference: APOCALYPSES ARE FOR
THE MASSES! THEIR CINEMATOGRAPHY IS APPALLING!

What do you think about communism in general and Andropov in particular?

Note: mark your answers with a cross at the end of the survey.

The eternal flies, the swallows and the summer.

In the saint, all this awakes a sentiment of the admirable, New and unrepeatable.
A forest of sensations, in the opinion of the denigrators who are incapable of
understanding the delightful rationalism that drives the myth-making machine.

Of the latter we can say:

It has the discipline of the Kamikaze pilot

It is everywhere (and everything is in it because it is working)
It is a squanderer (but not chic)
It has a skier’s irony.

Our prudence is highly moralistic. No resignations, blows beneath the belt, Spanish
castles. If we speak about paradise, this is not propaganda and even less a
shortage of ideas. Astrologically (see Madame Min in “Mickey” n.º 176, Edições
Abril Cultural, 1973) we are condemned to paradisiacal delights, to nectar,
ambrosia (see “The Feat of the Centaurs”, by Georges Dumezil, where the problem
is approached incorrectly, as subsequently recognised by the author), and to
sacred chalices (in Monty Python’s version).

Julio Pontinha was a Portuguese porno-intellectual; we are a bunch of poor, lonely

cowboys. Whatever did you do with the corpses? They went to the mincer, chef!
My mum needed some meat for the lasagne!

There are those who like to bypass Utopias, those who like to brush against them
and those who are (h)eternally unsatisfied.

The Homeostetic, by contrast, is perpetually satisfied and pretends to search for

Harmony like someone doing his keep-fit exercises.
THEN THE CRITICS WILL COME TO SPIN THEIR YARNS,
SOAPOPERATICALLY!

Until the Final Victory, Comrades!

Pedro Proença, 1985

 XIV
LES ANIMACULES HOMEOSTHÉTIQUES

Now or never

Homeostetics is/was/will be an anima-collage made by animalcoholics.

We have no thirst (nor hope) for novelty, at least for that type of novelty that most
people seek out in order to then follow blindly. The only true novelty is death and
death is absurd.

We are quite sure that art is always at the end of its cycle, in the exact end point of
its own movement, with Hegelian sunsets and other crepuscular illusions. It’s
identical to saying that everything is in its beginning in the auroral ultimatum with
which the ELOHIM (in their Biblical plural) made Light. Bereshit.

Augusto Barata was also constantly dying (but who is Augusto Barata? - see his
aphorisms in a page to be subsequently determined).

The CONTINENTS Exhibition has a whiff of megalomania. We smell the in-

delicacy (and the mescal!): to the extent that all measurements must be measured.
To explain this hybrid sentiment of “hybris” we make use of the weary fragment of
Protagoras (coated with lots of Heideggerian and anti-Heideggerian syrup). In other
words, our excess is the gauge of all things, of both those that are and that appear,
and those that neither are, nor appear.

All pseudo-symbology make us think of the manifestations of our pro-fascist

authoritarianism of the end of the earth (at a time when the world no longer had
anything to grab hold of i.e., neither end nor beginning), in the Salazarian 1940s
and in the nostalgic, unhealthy PORTUGUESE WORLD.

We were educated in the gentle canons of a friendly colonialism, an overseas

homeland with its provinces and rivers that we carefully learned by heart. Salazar
was an old fool with a trembling voice and the Presidents of the Republic cut
ribbons for TV news broadcasts. We are guilty of colonialism, yes indeed, but we
decided to forget them and hand over the territories to the indigenous
revolutionaries, to their civil wars and consequent economic ruin. Mea Culpa is not
enough! Some of us were born or wandered in these PALOPs (Official-Portuguese
speaking African countries – it’s hard to imagine a more neo-colonial expression).
The Portuguese diaspora was naïve and evangelical. We are neither naïve nor
evangelical. We are mentally plundered returnees, but nonetheless have no desire
to go back not even with tears of sweet nostalgia. We are returnees, just as all
Portuguese people are returnees without even realising it. Like Ulysses, we return
without glory to our loved homeland, only recognised by a few stray dogs. This
return, this Nostos, is the return from which there is no return, as Kafka would say.
And a fatal diaspora will live in our hearts forever. This diaspora is the world
splintered into fragments, and it is these fragments that will rewrite the world, that
will combat night and resentment.

This exhibition is the cartography of an imaginary imperialism, without territories,

intended if you like, to animate French-speaking intellectuals, nomads.

The fascination of the exotic in an unexotic world.

“I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who
slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that
it was a new island in the South Seas…There will probably be a general
impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to
plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at
Brighton, felt rather a fool.” (Chesterton)

Exoticism and novelty are little more than this.

This exhibition is like a sponge that redeems all irony sharing a similar appearance.
It absorbs, absorbs, absorbs. Irony is never the essence but rather a rhetorical
method that denotes a certain modest chastity. At best it might speak of a parody
of our primary instructions and of fifth empires that vary from a boorish longing for
the good old days to the mystical megalomanias of Fernando Pessoa.
Or, this kills all our disbeliefs with a single blow.

Pedro Proença, 1986

 XV
CONTINENTS

The incessant end of art

Or
The incessant ends of art
Or
The art of incessant ends

(before us – before “This”)

In oceans of meaning they subsisted in islands, established themselves in coastal

regions, dedicated themselves with autophagic warmth to the luxuries of an
archipelago, to various forms of metaphysical tourism.
They resisted continental imperialisms.
Others, with eyes in the back of their heads de traseiros olhos, slobbered over
archaeologies without ruins. The unending search for eternal foundations. Or an
abstract personalisation (any old thing).
In the meantime the New disappeared, enamoured with its own history, in a rude
anarchy of speculations. The artists indulged in onanic simulations as part of
magnificent performances. The heralds of apocalyptic ecstasy were satisfied.

(the beginning of Nirvana?)

The work of art, impotent before the decline of meaning and truth (and its
derivatives) sought outlets in sphinx-like corridors of false enigmas. They
dramatised the elimination of meaning through recourse to technological scenarios,
schizophied memories, and uncertain instincts (such as having babies).

Liquid categories, dissemination of the cults of difference and indifference.

We feel happily condemned to rizomatic dizziness, enjoyable mimicry and

boundless appetite.
(roads, excesses and palaces)

The earth had trembled and was to tremble once again. We looked to one side for
fractal dispositions.
The earth, the plutonic entrails, chose not to reveal any more treasure. Perhaps if
they had been restricted to an octonian chastity. Perhaps everything, if it had
dissipated.
There was also the spherical being in its brilliant suspension. In a state of
permanent suspension. In the meteor of thought / suspension where there is no
cruelty or suffering, but only splendour.
(the love of dox (glory) and paradox)
Post-paradoxical children, trans-menippeical instincts instintos trans-
menipeicos, infra-cryptographic theatres.
Sealed contingencies. Or a cruel, frenetic, demanding desire to ornament the void
with pleasant paradises.
(Continents)
Just because.

Pedro Proença, 1986

 XVI
FROM CROCODILE ISLANDS

“Gaogaogaone! Tapaa!
And the stellas were shinings. And the earthnight strewed aromatose. His pibrook
creppt mong the donkness. A reek was waft on the luftstream. He was ours, all
fragance. And we were his for a lifetime. O dulcid dreamings languitous!
Taboccooo!” (Joyce, F.W., obviously)

Heterogeneous, Delphic, fracturing geographies, but with a syntax (military

predisposition) marked by the spectrum of Spartan Education.
The islands are like boomerangs: penisolated or phenixolated penisoladas or
phenixolares. They are reborn from their masturbation and return with a vague
sensation of not pertaining to any archipelago.
Oceania spreads itself via its small points, with the Japanese awaiting the end of
the second world war.
There is a midwife’s, sibylline or Socratic obsession.

The crocodiles are often confused with the whales. For example (consult the
encyclopaedias), the Leviathan. Can we talk about the whales of the Nile or the
amorous songs of the crocodiles. This clearly constitutes a case of croco-
dilettantism.

We should also consider the croco-dilemmas (of croco-dilemmatology) and an

endless network of furtive captures, at least within the eyes of the law. The signs
resign themselves therein. They allow themselves to be invested with the coming
and going of modest chastity. And as such they shine like Asiatic pearls. Or stars.
Or in turn these geniuses are sealed by Solomon and predestined for the
adolescent rubbing of an Aladdin.

Near to Budonga (in Samoamnesia) someone proclaims the independence of one

of these “crocodile islands”, that were rapidly converted into a Popular Republic
thereof.
Myself, in forced exile, content myself with admiring the energy of these people.
Erotic energy of those who listen to songs about Dante the Alligator & the
Schizophrenetic Girls.

Orientalisms are as swift as the market economy.

But the motorways of the Moorish woman are eternal.

As a Crioule once said: “on vá b’ulé Mécá avec la divine nullitule pu’ se tení’ plus
p’oches à Mécá!”

Pedro Proença, 1986

 XVII
SOME THOUGHTS FROM OUR WISE GURU
BUDONGUIAN NIRVANAS
AND SUBTLETIES

The hygiene of the soul requires subtle care. The entire mystery of the universe is
contained in BUDONGA, the tantric/homeoasthetic word.

Allegory: two men went in search of a den where they could recite BUDONGA. On
their way, they caught sight of a subtle pea – “My God, what if they are still abusing
our hospitable Cornelia, the Prudence girl, the snow-white bunny?...”. The pea then
went to request advice from the guru, Silva, a weary old tortoise. The tortoise, a
subtle master of Absence, simply said – “The Universe is a subtle puddle,
constantly buffeted by the wind, sand and millions of creatures, wherein we are
reflected and sometimes appear crystal clear and at other times turbid and
confused”. The pea thereupon replied: – “How vain you are! You just want to take a
bath. If the universe is a puddle, then I’m a circus seal!”
There was suddenly a sound of “Pling!” and the pea transformed into a circus seal.

BUDONGA is something so powerful, that any worm contemplating his subtle

beauty will crawl on its belly until the end of time.

For BUDONGA everything has a purpose. Nothingness emerges as a great

throbbing power, and the All appears as a subtle “soft-spring” divan.
BUDONGA is a genuinely HOMEOSTETIC product.
BUDONGA is the implacable negation of doubt. Anyone who dares to doubt this
fact is condemned to Budongian Torments.
The labyrinths of BUDONGA are unfathomable. All roads lead to BUDONGA.

Pedro Proença, 1986

 XVIII
RED-HAIRED ANXIETIES

The shadow of the Emperorʼs horse

Lies buried beneath Wang covered in flies

How can we talk about HOMEOSTETIC exploits?

The extermination of hermits, the trappings of stardom, magnets and the baton?
The quality of our military inflections? Of an unstoppable strategy worthy of Sun
Tzu?
Can we let Mecca rot at our feet? Can we abandon Thais and sleep in Limousines?
Can we be anguished strategists of another suave and cold war?
NO! AND NO!

THIS IS NO TIME FOR PARADOXES,

THIS IS THE TIME FOR SIX EQUALS ZERO!

(WHAT DOES THAT MEAN ANYWAY?)

Genius should not shut itself within cans of pomade, but should exist in the
fermentation/catapulting of the entire Homeostetic condition, i.e. through the
redemption of stardom, in the tie to an anacatastrophic morality, in indiscretion and
violent MODEST CHASTITY!
The vice of prophecy has been born within us and (what’s more) the prophecies
are in tune even in the most imbecile inflections. Imbecile…imbecile…imbecile
(repeat)
As with the oracular tap in Delphi we do nothing more than reveal. Old Heraclitus
once said the same!...
The interpretations, the meaning, the absurd destinies generated by semantics, all
this pertains to a morality other than that embraced by us in our free time. They
represent the rationality of our inattention!
(AUTHORITARIAN VOICE)
Everything we say is to be learned by heart, to be repeated!
There is nothing to be understood! Understanding ceased to be a need, a
requirement, an absolute and crystalline fact in order to be relegated to a place
where rotten furniture is being piled up!
TODAY, MORE THAN EVER, THINGS BEGIN AND END IN THE HOMEOSTETIC
PRIMER. IN THE TRUE SENSE OF A SCHOOL. OR ACADEMY!

WE DO NOT THINK
WE KNOW!

What’s the use of the dithyrambic mechanics of thought when in each vocal
inflection, in each minor gesture, we are the spokesmen of everything that has
been, and will ever be, thought?
As such Homeostetics is in favour of illuminated/enlightened Totalitarianism.
Compared with such a blissful dictatorship, the roads of democracy are highly
dubious! Compared with such a divine language, all babelisms are no more than
primal cryptographies!

Pedro Proença, 1985-86?

 XIX
NATIONAL CULTURE

For the good or ill of the Nation!

To accept the evils of the kingdom is to be a ruler of the Universe, Lao-Tsé (or Lao-
Tan, or whatever the hell his name was!) once boldly declared. The Homeostetic
question is associated with reviewing the body (with suitable make-up) of
insignificant national mythologies, not in terms of their negativity (oh Tchang-Tseu,
oh Scotus Erigena!), but as something that may be perpetuated, that may endure.

The Modern Tradition denies in order to affirm, the Homeostetic Tradition affirms in
order to deny.

What universal maxims may be constituted within this boundless territory wherein
we wander?

It is the world of Eça de Queirós, Agustina Bessa Luis, Ross Pyn, M. Oliveira,
Nicolau Breyner, etc., etc. Or is it the world of Hollywood filtered through pirate
cassettes and boorish, tired eyes?

Return to the territory. We Lisboners, haunted by the spectre of Ulysses/Odysseus,

by the one who takes longer than others to return - the nobody recognised by no-
one - perhaps we can never return, precisely because we are also nobodies and
don’t even recognise ourselves in the mirror. That is why our territory is mythical, it
is this prattle of fantastic geographies, the lies of Fernão Mendes, of Overseas
kingdoms, since the kingdoms over Here leave so much to be desired.

Do we have a common body? Do we have a non-identical identity?

What does Homeostetics have in common? Can we talk about a generation with
shared values and practises? We who spent our adolescence immersed in the
simulacrum of a revolution? We who chose not to affiliate in parties and didn’t turn
our backs on politics!
Look carefully! Homeostetics was descriptive at two levels:

The Portuguese universe is a space of great tension, blunders and sudden

changes. It is the paradigm case of a country halfway between the First and Third
World, between the middle-ccages and the computer revolution, between Roman-
Christian and Anglo-Saxon morality. A Lisboner is a country bumpkin in New York,
drinking abundantly from his flask of bootleg wine. He is already nostalgic for
marshlands but wants to be up-to-date. He wholeheartedly believes in Paradise
and considers nightlife to be sordid but can’t live without it. Time goes by and
stands still. There is a fever, an agitation. The white birches, water-lilies, break
dance, Lusiads, yoga, macho drunkenness, the warm sofa, Portuguese stew, Max
Burgers, the erotic show at the Ritz Club (Fellini-esque hyper-realism) after a few
hours waiting outside the doors of the Hot Club. The good Lisboner has no doubts,
because doubts do not contribute towards his happiness. The bad Lisboner
(99,9%) is wracked in anguish because the houses in Lisbon have narrow windows
(perhaps because of the heat?). The good Lisboner (us?) asks many questions as
if he already knew all the answers. In this manner he affirms polymorphism and the
insolubility of unnecessary enigmas. He asks questions in order that no response
may be given. The Portuguese universe, precisely for this reason, makes us laugh.
It stands between a photo-novel, Gongorism, the dessicated Greek tragedy, comic
strips (the Texas Jack collection), imbecilic speeches of political orators, sick jokes,
dry axioms of Espinoza and the chitter-chatter (with the eternal return of the hawk-
noses) of female porters. This is an ideal state because it marries, or opposes,
glutinous foreign culture (in an omnivorous, boorish, insatiable fashion) and our
own conceited (the Italians would say morbid) tendency of coceira(to scratch
mania) e o colchão(traduzir). In essence, we are fluffy, soft, i.e. almost rotten to the
core. We take advantage of that which is produced here and that which we can
import from abroad, in other words cultural imperialism, in a highly pedantic
manner. We mainly discuss and talk about that which is ignored, and through so
much idle talk we actually end up by knowing something. It’s like philosophy: at a
certain point we ascend so high to the peaks of magnificent words that at a certain
point we don’t know whether they mean anything at all. But conversation is
conversation, and even when we don’t have a clue, it’s better to talk than to be
silent, because knowledge, true knowledge, is unattainable.
To be visionary. That is, despite the above, to move forward, without complaints,
without miserabilist excuses. We have a kind of inexhaustible ambition in our
blood, even if this has echoes of a Fifth Empire. Great epic journeys animated by
typical and Camões-esque(?) grandiloquence (neo-Latin). Great works, even if only
in terms of effort, or the scale of the undertaking. Great Utopias (that we keep
beneath ground, hidden from everyone in case they poke fun at us). Without
ambitions, any discipline is inevitably postponed. Lesser ambitions always fall by
the wayside, they are the bourgeois ballast of home-ownership, bringing up
children and pursuing a career. We want more! We want something that is too big
to fit in a single lifetime!

Pedro Proença, 1985

DOXA EST IN PARADOXA
PARADOXA EST IN DOXA

(short homeological treatise)

The comfort of knowing that a situation is paradoxical.

And, at the same time, nothing is resolved.

A paradox does not cease to be a paradox just because it ascends to a higher

logical level. (Russell’s theory)

Distance is only in terms of experience, of something of which we understand

the paradox is a paradox. This “this” registers the situation and creates a sense
of distance. Or is it familiarity?

All paradoxes are true.

All paradoxes are false.
All paradoxes are paradoxical.

A paradox is not only a question of logic: it concerns the effectiveness of “signs”

over things.

Buddhism, in its “sophisticated” version, from Nagarjuna to Dogen, arises as a

genuine paradox-generating machine, a machine that uses the prestige of logic
against the tenebrous power of the symbolic.

This kind of Buddhism does not appreciate metaphor. Metaphor is a

strengthening of the linguistic discourse. It is the splendour of language. It is the
violence of the word.

Paradox is non-biblical.

Logos made itself Flesh because it desired to be Flesh.

Flesh that is Logos incarnate is made and then resuscitated.
The resuscitated is still Logos, but is also Flesh.

In the beginning Logos was only Logos.

Logos through Diction made Light and the World: Radiance and Ornament.

Logos & Logos that is Elohim: plurality before things: heading.

Becoming & Life: in the zoological sense.

I am that which I am not

This is what is not / the is is not
The is is not?
The is is and is not?
The is is and is?
The is not is?
The is not is is?

Being will be that which it will not be

Being is the refutation of probability
Therefore, not only will it not be that which is no longer
It will also not be that which we judge is to come

Being is the power that diverts itself from the coming-to-be.

The emergency of things is not even refutation in a negative sense, it is merely

a great displacement in terms of expectations.

That which will be will be that which will not be.

In relation to one, is it possible that it will be everything other than that which we
expect from it (an a-prophetic and a-fatalist attitude)? There are the hypotheses
of action and inaction.

Sterile inaction (almost impossible)

Fertile inaction
Redundant action
Creative action

The paradoxes of action:

Do that which you would not do (Almada)
Don’t do what you would do
Do the non-doing
Do what you wouldn’t do
Do in order that it will not be done
Don’t do in order that it will be done
The imperative is the catalyst of action.

It is better not to relinquish the doing or the non-doing to others.

It is preferable that it is achieved through “chance”.

To block:
I love committing faux-pas.
I love being stupid.
I love fooling myself, failing, being slow-witted.
I don’t give a damn about any of this!

Deep down, committing a faux-pas is delicious and those who do not commit
them are profoundly square.
Who cares about the repercussions of a faux-pas? The negative feedback also
has positive feedback.

It is almost natural to commit faux-pas in front of paranoid individuals such as

Batarda. I would say: it’s inevitable.

Fortunately, I always fall short of others’ expectations.

The kind of people who are so demanding and intelligent that they never meet
their own standards.

The fact of not meeting our own standards is unimportant. I could even say that
I meet my own lowest common denominator. In every sense of the term.
To desire the most, but without any expectations. To strive after the absolute, as
a game, a private joke. Everything is a private joke, intransmissible and at the
same time contagious.

Mimicry for everything at the same time.

The paradox is as easy as jumping over a skipping-rope.

The sophistic techniques of the (retirar o the, refere-se ao personagem e não ao

livro de Platão) Gorgias are as disconcerting as mondo techniques. If someone
addresses you with a serious discourse, make fun of it with a comic discourse
and vice-versa.

We’re getting too serious (laughter!)

“If someone asks you about being, respond with non-being. If someone asks
you about non-being, respond with being. If they ask you about the common
man, respond in terms of the wise man (and vice-versa). By virtue of this
method of mutually-related opposites you will attain understanding of the Middle
Way. To each question posed respond in terms of the opposite.” (in Watts)

Sophistry is also stylistic. We may answer a question in a multiple range of

tones. Generally, its technique consists in presenting an argument, a counter-
argument, a counter-counter-argument and finally a counter-counter-counter-
argument. It’s a bit like an American legal-eagles TV series.

More serious than the argument of the inexistence of being is the

incommunicability of being or the non-communicability of everything. The
inexistence of being in Gorgias, also serves for the Buddhist apotheosis: neither
being nor non-being. There is no plausible substance.

Language is not very reliable. Consensus is circumstantial and illusory. Even

so, language is that which can be shared and has a certain impact on human
acts. It would be stupid to throw it onto the rubbish heap. It’s use is the force of
a community, but it has no absolute character. And, if it generates
misunderstandings, it also avoids others. To speak is to share a mimetic
disposition.

Paradoxes are not only verbal, they may also be visual, textile, climatic,
olfactory, palatable, sexual.

The homeostatic doctrine consists in seeing something paradoxical in every

opinion, prestige, trend and inclination. Any viewpoint is paradoxical.

Inversely, an understanding of paradoxicality is tendentious, given that it

deviates from the intrinsic (and sometimes terrible) living force of paradoxes.

Buddhism is excessively prohibitive. It seems to be always attempting to avoid

something, however well-educated it may be.

I don’t want to deliberately avoid anything. My negativity is a farce.

I criticise language because I love it.

To seek satori is the same thing as losing it. If you seek it, it’s in order not to find
it.

Seek to avoid. Avoid seeking.

Seek against expectations. Seek through pure loss.

We cannot free ourselves because we are already free. We were always free.
All of us. Everything.

That may even be a lie. But it’s all the same anyway.

I don’t seek out nor seek myself. I am found. What is it that finds me?

Stupid, fortuitous and delicious chance.

Everything searches for us. We play hide-and-seek.

That which within me seeks me out would prefer not to find me.

If I seek, I lose myself.

I’m sought by search warrants.

To search is to be concerned. But to find anything you have to empty yourself.

Seek to vacate.

Demobilise the instants.

I’m worried about getting worried.

Guilty for being busy.

Sterile inaction is the neutral force that sustains the world.

Inactive action debases the world (simple thermodynamics).

Active inaction sustains the world, consolidating it through homeostasis.

Active action changes the world for good and ill simultaneously.

“Forced spontaneity” (Xana), is a voluntary variant of the involuntary “be

spontaneous”. The paradox is that of a comic situation, of playful involvement,
inserted within a delirious Spartan Education.

It is through fleeing that we find ourselves. (M. Vieira)