THE COMMUNE OF

NIGHTMARESThe Commune of Nightmares is an ambiguous idea, speculative
theory, an idée fixe. On one hand it refers to the very realnightmare – or nightmarish reality – that we inhabit: necrocapitalism, the 'Anthropocene', global ecocide, war, racism,
patriarchy, generalised injustice…. One could imagine a
community of people that constitutes itself simply by being
aware of the nightmarish quality of this reality – not ignoring,justifying, enforcing or promoting it.
On the other hand, the fact that everybody dreams, hints at
another conception of the communal: We all have nightmares.
It’s a generic definition of being human, an involuntarycommunity of nightly terrors and bad dreams that takes different
shapes according to gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic class.
The Commune of Nightmares unfolds between these two poles,
traversing dream and waking world, figurative and literalmeaning, the social and the personal. It has nothing to do with
reductive notions of collectivity or community, it does not comewith a fixed theory. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams does not
apply to The Commune of Nightmares, it sneers at Jungianarchetypes. The community at work here, always alreadyunworking itself, can best be described with Jean-Luc Nancy’s
concept of Being Singular Plural: Being as necessarily andapproximately communal since the singular can only become inits relation to the plurality of the others. It establishes a queer
connectivity in which the distance between individuals isprerequisite for relation and vice versa:“Everything, then, passes between us. This 'between', as its nameimplies, has neither a consistency nor continuity of its own. It
does not lead from one to the other; it constitutes no connective
tissue, no cement, no bridge. […] That which does not maintainits distance from the ‘between’ is only immanence collapsed inon itself and deprived of meaning.” (Nancy 2000, p. 5).
An inevitable connection between singular individuals thatnonetheless requires distances, gaps and intervals forplurality/community to unfold.
Nancy equates the notion of a community that strives forimmanence without distance as a 'work of death' akin to theVolksgemeinschaft or fascist forms of the communal. What Nancy
strives for is an ontology that operates beyond and below thedichotomy of subject and object, an ontology wherein every
articulation of being is essentially one of being with. The social
form of this ontology could be grasped as potential communism:“It is here […] that the communionless communism of singularbeings takes place […]” (Nancy 1991, p. 72 f.f.).
How can we grasp these singular beings, what is their 'ontologicalshape', and how do they interact? An answer to this problem
might be found in the more radical fringes of contemporary
neuroscience that challenge those traditional notions of the selfthat rely on tacit metaphysical concepts like the 'soul'. ThomasMetzinger challenges these notions when he writes:

“It is the invariance of bodily self-awareness, of agency, andautobiographical memory which constitutes the conscious
experience of an enduring self. The conceptual reification of what
actually is a very unstable and episodic process is then reiterated
by the phenomenological fallacy pervading almost all folkpsychological and a large portion of philosophical discourse on
self-consciousness. But it is even phenomenologically false: weare not things, but processes.” (Metzinger 2004, p. 325).
These processual selves are necessarily dependent on each other.
What constitutes a process is change, it relies on the plurality ofthe others as producers of variance. The processes that
constitute us are indivisibly singular but at the same time totally
relying on the plural. When all of us are more processes thanthings, then these processes are intertwined. It is from this fabricor entanglement that discourse, thinking and creativity emerge.
In the realm of the written word, Nancy dubbed this process
literary communism:“[…] It is because there is community – unworked always, andresisting at the heart of every collectivity and every individual –[…] that there exists the exingency of 'literary communism'. And
this means: thinking, the practice of sharing of voices and of anarticulation according to which there is no singularity but that exposed in common, and no community but that offered to thelimit of singularities.” (Nancy 1991, p. 72 f.f.).
There is an irreducible communism at work in all that is social –and therefor economic and political. Even the most basic
functions of quotidian capitalism depend on it. One of theirreducible factors of 'being with' is having needs and desires,without which nobody would be compelled to buy or sell
anything. Society is not the same as community, but it depends
on residues of the communal to survive.
'Literary communism' can be taken as a chiffre for cultural
production in its entirety. All texts, songs and works of art emerge
from the entanglements of the singular-plural. Every artifact ofcreativity is always already a reworking of something that hashappened before, an appropriation, an infringement ofcopyright. The situationist détournement is 'literary communism'
from a different angle. As McKenzie Wark writes:“Détournement […] refers to the practice of taking all of pastculture and knowledge to be a commons, as always and alreadybelonging to all of us. […] the collective labor of unmaking frombelow the language of those above [...]. When drawn into thepractice of everyday life, ideas dissolve into their constituent
parts, the bits of language, which are articulated in new andsurprising forms. This is détournement at work, the molecularlabor of making and remaking sense in given situations.” (Wark2016, p. 13 f.).
If we have this trove of collective knowledge – a commons – that
we tab into more or less unconsciously, what do we need any
notion of a 'collective subconscious' or archetypes for? An
archetype is an unchanging thing, a fixture of 'human nature', amonomyth, a coagulated piece of patriarchal mythology.
Conversely, collective knowledge is subject to change, a planewhere power and resistance can unfold. History and biography,
the personal and the political, entangled in stories and dreams.

The Commune of Nightmares reaches into the waking world.
Dreams rework themselves into art and politics. In the words ofGerman playwright Heiner Müller: “The whole point of any
artistic endeavour is to chase your dreams. You try to achieve thestringency of your dreams, but you never do, because in a dream
everyone is a genius and that’s what you are chasing.” (Müller
2019, p. 110). Everyone is a genius while dreaming. Wheneverybody is a genius, no one is a genius. What’s more: when theself is more of a process than a thing, when cultural production isalways already the emergent result of communal unconscious/unconscious communism, then what about the artists andtheir products? In his book Social Dissonance, Mattin states that:“[…] the narrative of the self is often promoted in artistic
situations through notions of authorship or embodiment, which
generally assume the idea of the self as proprietor of its own
experience, therefore emphasising a notion of natural experience
which takes for granted the forms of selfhood that Metzinger’s
research undermines.” (Mattin 2022, p. 121).
Can we claim authorship of dreams, as property? Alienation andcommodification inevitably intersect in the figure of the artist,
who in one way or the other is busy promoting themselves/theirproduct/the self. As Mattin writes: “Capitalism needs stable
selves in order to sell commodities back to its labourers on themarket, but at the same time this stable sense of self isincreasingly undermined by the technological saturation of thesocial.” (Mattin 2022, p. 110).
What we deem the most personal, our tastes in music, art andentertainment, is interconnected with the algorithms ofcorporations. From a historical point of view, the perception ofpeople is not a static matter, it is subject to changes, modulations
and recoding. Walter Benjamin once summarized thiscircumstance in a concentrated form: "[D]uring long periods ofhistory, the mode of human sense perception changes withhumanity’s entire mode of existence." (Benjamin 1968, p. 222).
We dream different things than our grandparents. Did people
have monochromatic dreams when cinema and television where
black and white, do fascists have fascistic nightmares?
Dreamscapes haunted by avatars, bots, and advertisements,nightmares screened by algorithms, waking up startled because
everybody unfollowed you, an uncannily smooth looking figure
with six fingers and two left hands lurking in the shadows.
Dreams are not removed from the social fabric. Society, politics
and the economy permeate dreams and nightmares: theunconscious as an utterly public affair. Dreams are a central
metaphor for utopian politics, we call the creeping disaster we
inhabit a living nightmare. If reality has nightmarish qualities,
what kind of rift is opened by waking up? If nightmares haunt us
in our sleep and we wake up to a nightmarish reality, theCommune Of Nightmares emerges at the intersections of both
dream and the waking world and the singular-plural.
Turning the involuntary Community of Nightmares into
something conscious and voluntary, becoming the livingnightmare of those who turn our lived experiences into one –after all, one is 'allowed to dream'.

On a more personal/technical note: this project started in early2023. On a couple of occasions I woke up with self-inflicted minor
injuries (scratches in the chest, He Bit His Tongue In His Sleepetc.). I started working on a couple of songs with the aim to catch
something like a generic dreamlike atmosphere. Not referring todreams as a personal experience (I rarely remember my owndreams), but as a shared social phenomenon. On the sonic level:in the 1990s I used to make noise with a four-track cassetterecorder. I dragged these tapes around for years and also
accumulated a stash of various used cassettes found on the street(mix tapes, audio diaries etc.). I started cutting these tapes atrandom, splicing them into loops of varying length and used themas the basis for the songs on The Commune of Nightmares. A kindof audio-cadavre exquis played with a former version of myself
and random strangers. The song titles can be read as the script toa nightmare, hopefully an interesting one.

■DW

Sources:Benjamin, Walter (1968): Illuminations, New York: Schocken
Mattin (2022): Social Dissonance, Falmouth: UrbanomicMetzinger, Thomas (2004): Being No One, Cambridge MA: MIT Press

A1 He Bit His Tongue In His Sleep
A2 Where Nothing Happens But The Wallpaper
A3 She Calls In The Airstrike
A4 Behind The Billionaire’s Graveyard

Müller, Heiner (2019): Traumtexte, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp
Nancy,JeanLuc(1991):The
Inoperative
Minneapolis/Oxford: University of Minnesota Press

Community,

B1 They Sidestep Extinction
B2 Surrounded By The Smell Of Servitude
B3 In Nightmares Screened By Algorithms

Nancy, Jean Luc (2000): Being Singular Plural, Stanford: Standford
University Press
Wark, McKenzie (2016): Molecular Red, London/New York: Verso

Karl (KR113) 01-26-24
http://www.karlrecords.net/
https://davidwallraf.com/