Even in his native Portugal, the name of Clement Pires means little to most contemporary theorists and scholars of art. Indeed, he is remembered today chiefly, if at all, for a series of highly choreographed street demonstrations occurring in Lisbon in the early 1970s, during the final years of dictatorial rule: university students, with the odd scholar and labor leader mixed in, are recalled on several occasions to have gathered in mock military formations across public squares, chanting a Romanized translation of "The Jabberwocky" while stripping off their clothes and painting themselves in cow's blood. Pires, rumor had it, was behind these demonstrations, which he was supposed to have considered instances of a movement he called "de-situationism," though to the best of my knowledge there is no extant written record of this term.   Curiously enough, no newspaper evidence of these "de-situationist" happenings seems to exist. The record of the events, perhaps fittingly, obtains only in the oral histories passed down to this day by the anti-Salazar and anti-Caetano military men of the Armed Forces Movement. After the successful military coup of 1974, Pires disappeared from the country; his withdrawal from Portugal coincided with his withdrawal from the contemporary theoretical scene: publications under his name ceased to appear.

In fact, as of the date of this writing, Pires resides in Brooklyn, where he pursues his meager existence in one of that borough's large public-housing complexes.   He has asked me not to disclose any more specific information about his whereabouts or activities, though he has given me permission to translate, from the Portuguese, one of his rare recent writings (unpublished until now in any language): a series of observations on a recent performance of the Brooklyn-based "minimalist death-metal" band Alcoholocaust.

I will be brief in my interpretive remarks. Pires's compositional method recalls nothing so much as an early Godard film: Marxist sloganeering adumbrating clusters of analysis, the relationship between the fragments mimicking the disorienting quick-cuts of the glory days of the cinematic New Wave. (Guy Debord is the other obvious model). The comparison to Godard is not arbitrary: I am privileged to know that, when not pacing the city's parks, Pires spends countless hours watching and re-watching Breathless and Masculin Feminin (the only two DVDs the man owns). The contrast between the theoretical material and the sloganeering recalls a claim Zizek makes somewhere regarding Adorno: no matter how abstract and super-fine the Adornian theoretical edifice, a kernal of vulgar Marxism must here and there assert itself as, so to speak, the rough glue which holds the higher subtleties together. Pires's method consciously stages this tension--the slogans that punctuate his essay reveal the otherwise suppressed vulgar Marxian kernel. (Though perhaps Pires's style is less Adornian than Nietzschean). What follows is a brief section of Pires's writing on Alcoholocaust. The full text runs to over 300 pages; I have had time to translate only a sliver of the complete work.

ALCOHOLOCAUST: or, THE UPPER-MIDDLE CLASSES CONFRONT THEIR UNEARNED PRIVILEGE THROUGH THE HIGHLY SELF-CONSCIOUS PRODUCTION OF AURAL FEACES

by Clement Pires. Translated from the Portuguese by J. Nitgük.

Someone--I trust my readers (ah, but who are my readers?) will know who--has said that what ideology conceals the genuinely great work of art reveals; and yet ideology at every point penetrates the Kunstwerk --and who is privileged to locate, to fix, to specify that glorious node wherein, with a divine glow, aesthetic transcendence obtains?

THE LYRIC POEM IS AS DEAD AS THE LABOR MOVEMENT

Can obscenity, the elaborately pornographic, or the repellently intestinal, perform the violent reassertion of a lyric subjectivity beyond the fixed parameters of an American late-capitalist superstructure geared towards compulsive acquisition and global military domination? Our more philosophically astute guardians of public morality might claim, not entirely implausibly, that such displays are nothing more than effects of a regime which, rather than break free of, they merely reiterate in unpalatably pungent form; the unpleasantness of such desperate attempts at the re-assertion of lyric subjectivity thus assumes the character of mere symptom .

NO FLOWERS GROW FROM THE SOCKETS OF BAUDELAIRE'S SKULL

Alcoholocaust : in a gesture of supreme poor taste, the last century's definitive tragedy (but do we already resort to clichés?) is packed into a portmanteau with what Nietzsche has referred to as "the narcotic of the European." One recalls Baudelaire's imperative to "get drunk": and the dream of lyric subjectivity rears its inebriated head, for the paradox has been sufficiently, succinctly, stated in the very title of the band.

AFTER AUSCHWITZ, DRUNKENNESS IS IMPOSSIBLE

A comprehensive history of the crisis in Western values after the second war might do worse than to focus on the century's ceaseless production of cheap, fattening, and fundamentally unpalatable foodstuffs; and the donuts [English in the original] taped to the nipples and hung upon the sex of the band's spastic drummer constitute the symbol of a full-scale Romantic-lyric assault on the degradation of human desire itself to a fattening lust for the overly-sweet and the deep-fried--the so-called "erogenous zones" are revealed as mere material for the satisfaction of appetites relentlessly generated by the mega-firms whose suited executives control the levers of our desire. Or: is this what we want? Have we been freed from the constricting morality of self-denial, from the Christian graying of the human soul (Swinburne), by the advertising firms that grant us, finally, freedom to choose? That decadence is freedom is apparent in the bloated sentences--and equally bloated waistline--of the American Henry James, that prophet of late-capitalist desire.

RONALD REAGAN: LET THEM EAT DONUTS

THE LIBERATION OF THE WORKING CLASS CONSISTS IN THEIR FREEDOM TO PURSUE OBESITY AS A HOBBY

What do we hear behind the painful grunting of the singer--that throat-noise that serves to render unintelligible, thereby to negate, the content of his speech? Lines such as: "Your pussy is my ashtray," (confirmed only by access to the band's lyric-book). The dialectic of the contemporary citizen is precisely mirrored by the relationship of Alcoholocaust's audience to their lyrics: like the viewer in front of the nightly news, the audience member at an Alcoholocaust concert (if such a label is permitted) finds himself subjected to an unintelligible roar behind which, if he listens very closely, he might vaguely sense something unspeakable, but which refuses finally to cohere into anything other than a deadening roar. Or is this yet more cliché?

IS NOISE DECADENCE OR IS DECADENCE NOISE?

MY DESIRES ARE UNSPEAKABLE

I FALL ASLEEP MASTURBATING TO DREAMS OF NAPOLEAN

I AM A HORSE. FEED ME SUGAR. FEED ME SUGAR. FEED ME SUGAR.