Book Club: Guy Debord and the Situationist International

[Cain]

In retrospect, Vangiem may have been a better choice.

The affluent society is a society of voyeurs. To each his own kaleidoscope: a tiny movement of the fingers and the picture changes. You can't lose: two fridges, a mini-car, TV, promotion, time to kill... then the monotony of the images we consume gets the upper hand, reflecting the monotony of the action which produces them, the slow rotation of the kaleidoscope between finger and thumb. There was no mini-car, only an ideology almost unconnected with the automobile machine. Flushed with Pimm's No.1, we savour a strange cocktail of alcohol and class struggle. Nothing surprising any more, there's the rub! The monotony of the ideological spectacle makes us aware of the passivity of life: survival. Beyond the pre-fabricated scandals - Scandale perfume, Profumo scandal - a real scandal appears, the scandal of actions drained of their substance to the profit of an illusion which the failure of its enchantment renders more odious every day. Actions weak and pale from nourishing dazzling imaginary compensations, actions pauperized by enriching lofty speculations into which they entered like menials through the ignominious category of 'trivial' or 'commonplace', actions which today are free but exhausted, ready to lose their way once more, or expire under the weight of their own weakness. There they are, in every one of you, familiar, sad, newly returned to the immediate, living reality which was their birthplace. And here you are, bewildered and lost in a new prosaism, a perspective in which near and far coincide.

Vangiem was Belgian though, IIRC, so it would make sense he isn't afflicted with French Intellectual Writing Disorder.

[LMNO]

Well, I'm gonna make the cardinal sin and start skimming until I find something that won't make my eyes glaze over.  Hope I won't offend anyone by doing this.

[Cain]

Have a look at The Revolution of Everyday Life (pdf here http://ifile.it/ik3jgap).  If you find it more appealing, I have no qualms about changing.  The idea was to explore the SI, so whichever text is more engaging is the one that should be used.

[LMNO]

The current one has a lot of different essays, so I'll just keep going through this one & see if anything pops up, for now.  But I'll be sure to read that one, too.


To be clear: I like the Situationist theory, not trying to knock it.

[Cain]

No, its cool.  I did originally pick this one because it gave a greater overview, but, having read enough French philosophy over the past year to kill a weaker man, I hadn't really taken into account the problems of French Intellectual Writing Disorder.  Because, compared to Foucault or Lacan, Debord positively sparkles.

[LMNO]

Refining my thoughts a bit, I think it's not so much the Intellectualism (that would be kind of hypocritical of me, anyway) but that I already agree with a lot of his main points, and he seems to be intent on going through each idea in minute detail and with polemic arguments.  So, it becomes sort of agressively preaching to the choir.  I'm convinced, let's get on to the next step. 

On the other hand, there are a lot of good quotes floating around these essays.  For example, a swipe at the surrealists, which could also be appropriated for the Pinealists:

The error that is at the root of surrealism is the idea of the infinite wealth
of the unconscious imagination. The reason for the ideological failure of surrealism
was its having wagered that the unconscious was the long-sought chief
power of life... We now know that the unconscious imagination is poor,
that automatic writing is monotonous, and that the whole genre of the "unusual,"
which the changeless surrealist trend ostentatiously parades, is extremely
unsurprising.

[The Johnny]

I apologize for my delay in involvement on this thread; i might follow a slower pace, but im in for the long haul, the Situationists is a subject that ive put off for too long in different times.

I hate the style, "look at me im an intellectual princess with big words" etc.

Debord's view of Dada doesnt seem too well explained in the introduction, other than it was the refusal of bourgeois values and the refusal of the destruction of art/writing and vs WWI. His perspective of it also being "destruction of art" seems to me VERY metaphorical almost to the point of meaninglessness.

I found it interesting that the "bourgeois epoch" consisted of "everlasting uncertainty" and that Dada simply added to its flux, thus giving it new life instead of destroying it.

I found cheesy that "the situationists are at the service of the necessity of oblivion".

What i found scary about the S.I. is that they wished the disappearance of the subject just as much as their "adversaries"; i find it very creepy that both the "police" and the "situationists" aspired to controll techniques of conditioning to make their own ideas of utopia, crushing beneath things like "personality, memory and tragedy".

So from this im kind of envisioning them sort of pig-like just as police; not with the goal of THINK FOR YOURSELF, but more of a goal of imprinting their own retarded utopia upon others.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The situationist movement's retarded utopia was much closer to "THINK FOR YOURSELF" than the alternative. I remember reading this document on how to join the movement -- they had the person praise two documents in one essay and then brutally tear apart the same two documents in a second essay, explaining that anyone who is afraid of criticizing the SI (or unable to) shouldn't be allowed in.

[The Johnny]

The situationist movement's retarded utopia was much closer to "THINK FOR YOURSELF" than the alternative. I remember reading this document on how to join the movement -- they had the person praise two documents in one essay and then brutally tear apart the same two documents in a second essay, explaining that anyone who is afraid of criticizing the SI (or unable to) shouldn't be allowed in.

Well, im just reporting back on my hermetic reading and what i think.

I sure hope its got more to do with what you say it does, otherwise its gonna be a loooong read.

[Cain]

The book does assume a certain level of familarity with avant-garde movements of the 20th century, I will admit.

However, the intellectual prose is mostly parody, when you read it closely enough.  Oh, they're making real enough points, underneath it all, but both French and Left intellectual culture at the time meant you had to have a nearly mindbending amount of jargon in your work, or else you lacked "theoretical depth" and "sufficient seriousness".

I'm really starting to think that The Revolution of Everyday Life would have been a better introductory text.

Edit: or Not Bored!, which is a contemporary site with Situationist leanings

[Cain]

Not Bored actually critiques the book we are reading as follows:

In 1997, someone named Thomas F. McDonough (see picture above) edited a special issue of October that focused upon "Guy Debord and the Internationale situationniste."[1] This collection had an announced agenda: to provide a counter-weight to Ken Knabb's Situationist International Anthology (1981), which, as Knabb himself says, is "admittedly weighted somewhat toward the situationists' later, more 'political' period." But McDonough's special issue of October, though it focused on the situationists' earlier, more "artistic" period, wasn't really weighty enough to offer an effective counter-balance to Knabb's massive Anthology. And so, in 2002, October expanded the collection and published it as a 500-page-long, illustrated tome entitled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Its editor: Tom McDonough.

Centered around 1958, the year the first issue of Internationale Situationniste came out, this book certainly reveals a few glaring omissions from Knabb's collection: the complete text of Debord's 1957 "Report on the Construction of Situations," (Knabb only offered excerpts);[2] Debord's "Theses on the Cultural Revolution" (1958); the unattributed "Critique of Urbanism" (1961); and Raoul Vaneigem's "Comments Against Urbanism" (1961). But Knabb is not just "countered" as an editor, but as a translator, as well. McDonough ignores Knabb's translations of such early, "cultural" texts as the "Report on the Construction of Situations" (1957), "All the King's Men" (1963) and "The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Art and Politics" (1963); and either brings in other translators (John Shepley or Thomas Y. Levin) or translates the texts himself.[3]

But Knabb's Anthology holds its own against this onslaught. Though it is in fact more heavily weighted towards the SI's "second" period (1962-1971) than its first (1957-1961), Knabb's book still provides a good selection of early documents, some of them produced well before 1957. But McDonough's book only offers four texts written after 1963: Theo Frey's "Perspectives for a Generation" (1966), Mustapha Khayati's "Captive Words" (1966), Rene Vienet's "The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art" (1967), and the unattributed "Cinema and Revolution" (1969). With the exception of the unremarkable essay by Theo Frey, which was only included, perhaps, because Frey was excluded from the SI,[4] all of these texts were already available in Knabb's Anthology. None of them are major contributions to the situationist project.

Here's the kicker: although Tom McDonough provides an introduction to the big and weak volume that he's put together, he's no longer interested in Ken Knabb's Situationist International Anthology nor in rectifying its over-emphasis of the SI's later, political period at the expense of its earlier, artistic period. Tom McDonough has moved on. "This introduction is meant polemically," he writes,

"as an initial foray into new interpretive territory, as a suggestion for moving beyond the stale categories into which we have compartmentalized our thought on the Situationist International. Those categories -- of avant-garde purity, or of chronological and ideological division ('artistic' versus 'political' phases or wings) -- now simply hinder any understanding of this group; it is time to move beyond them.

"

Tom McDonough is not Thomas F. McDonough and hurumph! Tom is not interested in what Thomas was interested in back in 1997. Tom McDonough is interested in what he calls "a 'Tafurian' critique of situationist positions" -- 'Tafuri' being Manfredo Tafuri, an Italian architect (1935-1994) and the author of Architecture and Utopia (MIT Press, 1976). And so the reader is confronted with a double deflection. First, there's a deflection away from Knabb's political preoccupations and (back) towards the SI's early, artistic period; and then a deflection away from the SI as a whole and towards Manfredo Tafuri's critique of artistic avant-gardes. But fast-moving Tom McDonough didn't update the body of his book to keep pace with the initiatives of his "Introduction: Ideology and the Situationist Utopia." Not one of the ten critical essays that he includes in his book mentions Tafuri or the relevance of his "critique" to the situationists. Tom McDonough moved on, but he forgot to take his book with him. And so it just sits there, thick as a brick.

An introductory essay should make us want to read what follows it; but McDonough's introduction doesn't. More like a negative essay that might be included in a volume (as a counter-weight to more positive evaluations) than a neutral or "objective" essay that introduces the volume as a whole, McDonough's introduction is a hatchet job masquerading as a "critique." It openly accuses the situationists of unintentionally working on the side of "the police," socioeconomic rationalization, and the Stalinist "planification" of the future. So poisonous are these outright lies that McDonough feels compelled to reassure his readers that "This 'Tafurian' critique of situationist positions is not intended as a blanket dismissal, needless to say." The situationists didn't intend to work for the police, and Tafuri didn't intend to blow their cover, but . . . . Should we be surprised that the arbitrary drift of McDonough's stewardship of these "Texts and Documents" didn't raise any "red flags" at October or the MIT Press? Maybe not. After all, McDonough is certainly not the first academic scholar we've encountered who is openly torn between his resentment of (and ignorance about) Debord and the SI, and his need to make a living by continuously discovering new things to "historicize" and "interpret."[5]

Not surprisingly, the justification for McDonough's 'Tafurian' critique of the situationists lies in an obvious, perhaps even intentional misunderstanding of their ideas.[6] According to McDonough, everyone -- Tafuri, even Marx himself -- agrees that "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones." But Guy Debord, says McDonough, identified "the salient characteristic of bourgeois society" with "what he called in a telling phrase 'a freezing of life.'" Later McDonough will refer to something of his own invention, i.e., the situationists' "belief in capitalism's fundamentally static, affirmative quality," which allows him to proclaim that, "What is at issue here is the potential misrecognition on the part of the Situationist International of the role of the avant-garde in advanced capitalist society; rather than being the latter's absolute contestation, Tafuri raised the possibility that it was was this society's necessary adjunct."

But here McDonough is moving (away) too fast and speaking too generally. As always, Debord was historically specific when he spoke about 'a freezing of life': the phrase didn't pertain to all of bourgeois society, at all stages of its development, but to bourgeois society since the 1930s. And Debord carefully distinguished between a freezing of history, a freezing of "life" as lived experience, and the continuing and continuous flow of "revolutionary" new commodities, fads and ideologies. It was precisely this split that made real revolution necessary and desirable, and that suggested ways of bringing that revolution about. Furthermore, the situationists didn't "misrecognize" the "role of the avant-garde in advanced capitalist society." From the beginning, they were extremely critical of Dadaism and Surrealism[7] -- in all his talk of Tafuri's critique of artistic avant-gardes, McDonough gives the erroneous impression that the Situationists uncritically followed or repeated Dada's gestures -- and this is precisely why they eventually started conceiving of themselves as a properly revolutionary organization, not as an avant-garde group. But of course one won't find a reprint of Debord's "Minimum Definitions of a Revolutionary Organization" (1966) in Tom McDonough's book -- it's got nuthin' to do with art, dontcha know.

-- NOT BORED! 31 March 2006

[1] October #79, Winter 1997. See our comments, published in NOT BORED! #27, May 1997.

[2] Knabb's worse offense as an editor is certainly his replacement of sometimes lengthy passages with ellipses [...] Note our translations of How Situationist Books Are Not Understood and Remarks on the SI Today, both of which Knabb did not translate in full.

[3] Knabb may be not be a good editor, but he's a pretty good translator: that is to say, he doesn't make really egregious mistakes. For example, McDonough titles his translation of Debord's Le Grand Sommeil et Ses Clients (from 1955) "The Great [sic] Sleep and Its Clients," as if he's never heard of the Howard Hawkes classic 1946 film, The Big Sleep (Debord assuredly had).

[4] See The Alsatian Ideology, in Internationale Situationniste #11, October 1967.

[5] See our review of Simon Sadler's pathetic book The Situationist City (1998).

[6] Note the obvious manner in which McDonough carefully maintains his "confusion" about what only he insists is "that murky differentiation" between the SI and the police, which, he says, "was described as follows . . . in 'Now, the SI': 'The path of complete police control over all human activities and the path of infinite free creation of all human activities is one: it is the same path of modern discoveries.' The confusion that this might engender was little dispelled by adding that 'we are inevitably on the same path as our enemies -- most often preceding them -- but we must be there, without any confusion, as enemies.' The same path, a shared race, a mutual goal: how could one not be confused?" But only McDonough insists on maintaining that these enemies have "a mutual goal" and so he is the only one who is confused!

[7] See, for example, Guy Debord's comments about the avant-garde to Robert Estivals (1963).

[Cramulus]

hm - well that's a little disappointing.


Maybe we should switch tracks to Ourspace or Culture Jam, both of which have great sections on the SI?

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

The anthology that NotBored compares this to is available online. I sourced it extensively, back in the day. Horray for copyleft.

EDIT for link: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/index.htm
And, of course, auxiliary documents: http://library.nothingness.org/ http://namcub.accela-labs.com/stories/ebooks/spectacle.txt

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Okay, I didn't like the colour scheme on the BOPS website, so I took the Situationist Anthology, The Society of the Spectacle, and the suggested reading listed on the anthology page and pulled it into a text document. You can pdf it if it suits you.

Link: http://namcub.accela-labs.com/stories/ebooks/Situationist%20International%20Anthology++.txt

[Cain]

Bloody hell, I made a pdf of Ken Knabb's anthology a couple of days ago and noted down some things to consider discussing...then my computer shutdown (thanks, Windows updates!) and now I can't find the file.

I am slightly pissed off about this.