Something a little different.
http://ifile.it/5mef602
Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents by Tom McDonough (editor)/
From Wikipedia:
The Situationist International (SI) was a restricted group of international revolutionaries founded in 1957, and which had its peak in its influence on the unprecedented general wildcat strikes of May 1968 in France.
With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life being alternative to those admitted by the capitalist order, for the fulfillment of human primitive desires and the pursuing of a superior passional quality. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the construction of situations, namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study for the construction of such situations, like unitary urbanism and psychogeography.
They fought against the main obstacle on the fulfillment of such superior passional living, identified by them in advanced capitalism. Their theoretical work peaked on the highly influential book The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord. Debord argued in 1967 that spectacular features like mass media and advertising have a central role in an advanced capitalist society, which is to show a fake reality in order to mask the real capitalist degradation of human life. To overthrow such system, the Situationist International supported the May '68 revolts, and asked the workers to occupy the factories and to run them with direct democracy, through workers' councils composed by instantly revocable delegates.
After publishing in the last issue of the magazine an analysis of the May 1968 revolts, and the strategies that will need to be adopted in future revolutions, the SI was dissolved in 1972.
I'm joining the shit out of this, as soon as I can manage to get X running again.
This should make for some good discussion.
Whats the time-frame usually agreed upon to read through it?
It depends on the length of the book, and how easy it is to read.
Between two weeks and a month, shall we say?
Or, we can just start reading, and comment as we go. Since this isn't plot-driven, we won't have any spoilers, I don't think.
Quote from: LMNO on January 05, 2010, 01:56:59 PM
Or, we can just start reading, and comment as we go. Since this isn't plot-driven, we won't have any spoilers, I don't think.
that's probably the best way to go. Nothing to spoil here.
I have begun my massive printout.
printer... ENGAGE!
I'll probably have something to comment on by the weekend. At the latest.
wow, the introduction is dry, wordy, and full of jargon.
But it really does pick up after that!
from page 9---
QuoteThe spectacle is not merely advertising, or propaganda, or television. It
is a world. The spectacle as we experience it, but fail to perceive it, “is not
a collection of images, but a social relationship between people, mediated by
images.”10 In 1928 in One-Way Street, writing about German inflation, Walter
Benjamin anticipated the argument:
"The freedom of conversation is being lost. If earlier it was a matter
of course to take interest in one’s partner, this is now replaced by inquiry
into the price of his shoes or his umbrella. Irresistibly intruding
upon any convivial exchange is the theme of the conditions of
life, of money. What this theme involves is not so much the concerns
and sorrows of individuals, in which they might be able to help one
another, as the overall picture. It is as if one were trapped in a theater
and had to follow the events on the stage whether one wanted to or
not, had to make them again and again, willingly or unwillingly, the
subject of one’s thought and speech."
that really sums up very well what I dislike this week about capitalism
My tl;dr version of the intro (which may be a little incorrect):
The situationist international posed themselves against capitalism, but had to face the fact that they were partially a product of capitalism and that there was a distasteful interplay between capitalism and themselves. They were a product of their own history, and so the time and place should be taken into account when considering the texts.
Enki makes good points. Also, a little knowledge of Marxist philosophy, the Dadaists and art history doesn't hurt, when studying the Situationists. And to take into account the Situationists both had an inflated sense of their own importance in history, and that they often liked to use pretentious and academic jargon, to mock the intellectual community. You have been warned.
I'm going to take a crack at getting some useful discussion out of the intro, as well. McDonough's introduction isn't a sterling piece of writing, as Cram pointed out, but I've had to read worse.
Well, the intro wasn't as dense as The Society of the Spectacle at least.
Given the tendency for really pretentious verbiage (and occasionally attempts at subtlety that border on obfuscation -- for instance, how Debord made some passages in the Society of the Spectacle echo french translations of works of philosophy and then criticized english translations that didn't make those passages mirror the definitive english versions of those works) it may be a good idea to make tl;dr versions of many of the documents in here (kind of like LMNO's summaries of the chapters in Angel Tech). I'll work on a few of them since I did a paper on this last year, but I very well might gloss over some important points.
OK, so as I mentioned above, to understand the Situationists, you have to understand the Dadaists. What seems to be said, in the introduction is that the Dadaists succeeded in only strengthening art as a specialized domain of culture, because while they aimed to destroy it entirely, through their inhibition and manic creativity, they opened the field for the production of more art forms and types, allowing Dada to be co-opted and given its own little corner of craziness to play in, where it could be neutered and made safe for mass consumption, instead of the deadly subversive anti-art movement it originally was:
QuoteTafuri argued, dadaist negativity comprised the "conditions for the liberation of the potential, but inhibited, energies"of the bourgeoisie—or rather, he wrote, "of a renewed bourgeoisie, capable of accepting doubt as the premise for the full acceptance of existence as a whole, as explosive, revolutionary vitality, prepared for permanent change and the unpredictable."
Dada acted, in a sense, as a vaccine against future possible avant-garde attempts, because it made such attempts fashionable, and because such creativity was easily diverted into the cycle of consumption and re-creation of culture.
This is of interest, too:
QuoteIt was Marx himself who, at the very commencement of modern industrial society, described how "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society .... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones." Yet the salient characteristic of bourgeois society for Debord was predominantly not this sweeping away of "all fixed, fast-frozen relations,"but the very opposite—what he called in a telling phrase "a freezing of life."
Perhaps there is a way to reconcile the two (hah, dialectics, ITT). To begin with, in the early industrial era in particular, capitalist society did bring about massive changes. Nowadays though, the vogue is to pretend that every new product or lifestyle or technology will be "revolutionary", that it will change our lives forever. Consider the vogue for fad theories at the end of the Cold War, positing that we were moving into a new epoch of history, where the old rules do not apply. Meanwhile, there are many things that haven't changed, the social structure is more or less the same (the conditions are better, but then, the conditions of everyone have gotten better, so that is progress without change). The constant need for change, to present everything as new and paradigm shifting, this is a surface, a sales pitch under which society has essentially changed little. Of course, there have been some massive changes since then, I wouldn't deny the internet has lived up to the hype and then some, but many others have fallen by the wayside.
The spectacular vision of change is empty. Take a look at slightly dated science fiction, particularly for the casual set. In the Jetsons, there were robots and jet packs and yet the gender roles were that of the time period in which it was produced (I vaguely recall a Jetsons film made in the eighties wherein the daughter joins some punk feminist revolutionary movement -- I forget the details since I last saw it at the age of about five, but the point remains). The spectacular vision of change reflects a view of change as it is desired by the people who hold up the status quo (in the case of utopian stuff), which is to say a world wherein only the appearance (and amount of work being done) has changed, or alternately (in the case of dystopian stuff) a magnification of how a technology could fundamentally change some element of status:q for the 'worse' (for instance, the various and sundry stories in which teleporters and replicators crash economies without making a utopia, and the now-quite-bizarre foreboding cinematography accompanying a piece about racial mixing in the film adaptation of Alvin Toffler's 1976 Future Shock). Presumably, the International Conspiracy of Capitalist Pig Dogs would like all changes in technology to be purely spectacular -- give the illusion of novelty without actually making their job any harder. What They would like is the status quo with more shiny chrome and less housework.
Themes I picked up on in the Introduction.
An realization that Escalation of Disorder = Imposition of Order, and vice-versa. They realized that the negativity of Dada (as in, "to negate" the status quo) helped feed the status quo, as well.
A parallel to memetics; they called it "brainwashing", but they didn't seem to use it as a pejoritive. They talked about "a race between the artist and the police" over who could control the masses. They saw themselves on the same road as their enemy, but they had to remember who the enemy was, and that they themselves were also the enemy.
Finally, as it relates to the above, they spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to live in a reality like that; where your enemy fed on your attacks, and both of you were using the same techniques, towards the same goals.
Incidentally, it seems that this PDF has a DRM on it or something; I'm having trouble getting it on my Kindle. I'll start a new thread in Techmology for it; until then, I'll be reading it at work, so I might be slower in my reading than a lot of you guys.
Agreed, especially the final point seems one of the central ones of the Situationists, the possibility that the avant-garde only feeds and strengthens "bourgeois" society, and how to avoid this fate.
Also, to expand on the point of the artists/SI and the police using the same techniques: it seems to me what the SI are saying is that, as things stood then, people were, at best, only half-integrated into the current system. The police, or whatever, wanted to fully integrate them into the current system, and freeze that system forever, whereas the SI, in true Marxist form, wanted to transcend the current system. There is something...unsettling in how the Situationists describe going about this, about how the "subject must cease to be an obstacle in the rational functioning of the machine, must become completely moldable by the new science of the construction of situations"....but then I guess it depends who is doing the moulding. Self-moulding, for example, is quite different from having others do it for you.
I think though, the passage below puts it better, that "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."
From a Discordian point of view, the SI seemed to view capitalist society as fundamentally neophobic: "The authentically new (as compared to mere "novelty") was understood as a threat to social order because each innovation only exacerbated that order's central contradiction between the immensity of productive forces and the stifling conditions of production, between the technological means unleashed by the bourgeoisie and its need as a class to preserve inequality."
I think their assessment of everyday life has a lot to be said for it too: everyday life was "organized within the limits of a scandalous poverty,"a poverty defined by the "scarcity of free time and scarcity of possible uses of this free time." One of the things I hated about working full time was how little time was left to me to pursue my own interests and wants (admittedly, working a stupid shift did not help either). I think the lack of free time leads to the lack of possible uses, since it is the ultimate limiting factor.
"Debord would extend this idea by further describing ordinary existence as "a colonized sector," as "a kind of reservation for the good savages who (without realizing it) make modern society, with the rapid increase in its technological powers and the forced expansion of its market, work." Everyday life, then, marked a border, the "frontier of the controlled and the uncontrolled sectors of life"—between, that is, the planned sector of production and the as yet unplanned sector of lived experience, consumption, leisure." If we accept this, is it fair to say that everyday life has failed to become a frontier or border, that it has also been colonized? The commodification and systemization of leisure and entertainment since the the 1950s and 60s has been extraordinary. Where then is the border now?
That Capitalistic society is considered neophobic is an interesting twist, in that most capitalists would say that the system thrives on innovation and new ideas; the point being that those innovations must take place inside the capitalistic system. A new cereal isn't really a new idea, it's a variation on an existing idea.
Also, of course, that pure capitalism creates monopolies if unchecked. But for the layperson, the concept of capitalism as a reactionary force might seem odd.
One thing that I forsee about the CI is that they seem to truly separate themselves from the "masses". They sound like they consider themselves superior to the rest of society, and elevate themselves to a position of overseer. Like you said, they seek to control the masses... but for good reasons and ends. Uh huh.
As far as viewing capitalist society as a means of forcing people away from free time, and trapping them in jobs that prevent them from using any free time, I think you have to take a step back. From what I remember, western industrialization and capitalism created more free time than existed in ye olde days. Or, at least, the democratic politics that arose within capitalistic society. A worker in this century had more free time than in the last... although, the rich had plenty of leisure time in whatever century you choose.
Perhaps they'll get into this more later (just starting the Greil Marcus piece today), but it seems that your job might tie up your time and your body (as in, having to be in a certain place at a certain time), but it is up to the individual to decide if their job dictates their lives. Everyday Life can still be a frontier, but it is up to the individual to treat it as such. Do you want to be a Cowboy, living life on the range, or do you want to be the whore in the saloon?
Anyway, got my kindle issues fixed, so I'll try to catch up on my reading.
Well, damn. Check out this anti-Pineal rant:
Quote"If we are not surrealists it is because we don't want to be bored. . . . Decrepit surrealism, raging and ill-informed youth, well-off adolescent rebels lacking perspective but far from lacking a cause—boredom is what they all have in common. The situationists will execute the judgment contemporary leisure is pronouncing against itself."
Well, I'm not so sure I agree about the free time thing...as far as I know, factory work frequently involved 12+ hour shifts in the UK, which was far more labour intensive than farming. In the 20th century, things did get better, but that was mainly through the intervention of trade unions, which were influenced (at least in the UK) mostly by idealistic socialism of some kind or another (ie; pre-Marxist theories). Interestingly, Marx himself posited capitalism as a revolutionary force...but only revolutionary against the pre-existing feudal society it supplanted. Progression of history and all that.
In addition to the anti-"pinealism", the bit about the Beatniks was similarly cutting:
QuoteThe rotten egg smell exuded by the idea of God envelops the mystical cretins of the American "Beat Generation,"and is not even en-
tirely absent from the declarations of the Angry Young Men....They have simply come to change their opinions about a few social conventions without even noticing the whole change of terrain of all cultural activity so evident in every avant-garde tendency of this century. The Angry Young Men are in fact particularly reactionary in their attribution of a privileged, redemptive value to the practice of literature:they are defending a mystification that was denounced in Europe around 1920 and whose survival today is of greater counter-revolutionary significance than that of the British Crown.
The Situationists did not like religion, to put it mildly. They wrote in support of Iraqis who protested in the streets by burning Korans, for example. The pseudo-Zen undertones to some Beat writings would not have impressed them, and probably because this infused their writings, led to their condemnation for being "counter-revolutionary" (though, to be fair, the Situationists applied this term to everyone from the Soviet Union to most of their own members, at one point or another).
The Greil Marcus piece is full of tasty quotes.
Quotethe situationists were bent on discovering the absolute ability to criticize
anyone, anywhere—without restraint, without the pull of alliances, and without
self-satisfaction.
Did you say "grail", Marcus?
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sorry, I've had to get that out of my system for about six months
I want to participate on the discussion...
But this fuck at the printer messed up the first batch of 30 pages, i told him to fix them, and he said even do he wrecked them, he would have to charge me for them.
I properly told him to shove them.
So now i have to wait until monday, when the efficient and cheap printers by my school open.
Ok, finished the Marcus piece. I think I have a grasp at what the SI was trying to do... Capitalism has become consumerism, the goal of comfort has been replaced by the goal of consumption.
The goal of the SI was to argue against both Art and State, as each feeds the other.
Or something like that. Yes?
Next chapter is the man himself, Guy Debord.
Basically, yes.
The Situationists were very well aware that any legitimate threat to the system becomes (for lack of a better word) "cool", and "cool" is something the system can make into a commodity. Debord knew that if the Situationists turned Paris on its ear (which they did in May 1969), it would take exactly six months before all the teenagers became Situationists to follow the hip train. The System would take the movement's power and repackage it in safe, consumable forms.
This is a symbiotic system. Whatever exists outside of "the system" has a certain power.. a power which the system craves. People immersed in the system are BORED; they only get a charge out of novelty. The system cannot generate novelty -- It can generate an iphone in 256 different colors, but it can't come up with fresh ideas. Only repetitions of existing ones. So the input for the next wave of products always comes from outside the system.
EDIT TO ADD: and meanwhile, the counterculture needs the system. Coolness cannot be generated without a norm to escape. One cannot exist without the other. That's why Deboard didn't want to cast his lot in with the avant-garde, he knew they serve the system just like Milton's Lucifer serves God through his rebellion.
Look at the hippies, punk, grunge, MTV, skateboarding, whatever. Whenever kids start to find novelty outside of the system, that novelty will become a product. And the system is getting better at doing this - the turnaround time gets quicker every year. In the end, all resistance to the MachineTM feeds the MachineTM.
The Situationists knew they had to remain something that couldn't be easily absorbed and integrated. That's why they used non-sequitur as a form of resistance - nonsense is not easily explained, repackaged, or sold. They wanted to exist outside of reason AND outside of art. This fear of inevitable absorption was also a contributing factor to their dissolution - they'd rather disappear than see their movement detourned by the forces of commercialism.
They developed a few techniques (such as Detournment and the Derive) which they thought would subvert the system in new ways. I think they wanted people to reclaim Everyday life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyday_life), and the spirit of play. So their techniques are aimed at teaching people how to make new meaning out of existing structures. They wanted to build a new society in the cracks of the one that already exists. If enough people reclaim their own lives, there'll be no need for revolution.
More or less, yes. Also, a reminder for me to find where I put the file and continue reading.
So, the Guy Debord piece is short and to the point. Two quotes:
QuoteThe contempt these aging discoverers then profess for the very values from which
they make a living—that is, from productions contemporary with the decay of
their arts—becomes such a tainted position, requiring submission to the indefinite
prolongation of an aesthetic death composed merely of formal repetitions
that win over no more than a backward part of college-aged youth.
That is to say, Punk is dead the moment it makes a profit.
Quote...attachment to those creative forms permitted
and valued in the economic milieu of the moment is difficult to justify.
Voluntary blindness before the true prohibitions confining them leads the
"revolutionaries of the mind" to formulate strange defenses: the accusation
of bolshevism is the most typical of their indictments, which succeeds every
time in placing their opponent outside the law in the eyes of civilized elites.
Accusations of "socialism" are hardly new.
Basically, I take away another reiteration of the SI purpose: Transgressive Art plays into the hands of the System it Transgresses. Transgressive Artists find themselves playing within the System they are trying to Transgress. This makes them Dummies.
I think it's been said before, but they use very high-falutin' language.
In particular, I like this aspect of the SI's mission:
QuoteThe role of the Situationist International, its members wrote, was not to act as any sort of vanguard party. ("The task of any avant-garde,"they wrote, "is to keep abreast of reality.") The situationists "had to know how to wait,"and to be ready to disappear in a common festival of revolt. Their job was not to "build"the SI, as the job of a Trotskyist or Bolshevik militant is to build his or her organization, trimming all thoughts and all pronouncements to that goal, careful not to offend anyone who might be seduced or recruited. Their job was to think and speak as clearly as possible—not to get people to listen to speeches, they said, but to get people to think for themselves.
That's a program I can get behind. Help initiate the conditions for revolt, but keep oneself free of "party politics", of the cult of vanguardism and the need to become a mass movement, while at the same time trying to provoke people to think for themselves.
Yeah. I liked how they talked of the "spark of revolution" that was powerful enough to bring groups of people together for action; but that spark soon faded into heirarchy and politics. So (if I have this right), the thing to do was to keep looking and developing those sparks, and move on to the next thing once it's gone.
This from the Debord piece seems to speak to the destruction-creation dialectic
QuoteThe generation of Freud and the dada movement contributed to the collapse of a psychiatry and a morality doomed by the contradictions of the time. They left nothing in their wake, other than forms that some nevertheless insist on believing absolute. To tell the truth, all worthwhile works of this generation and its predecessors lead us to think that the next revolution in sensibility can no longer be conceived of as a novel expression of known facts, but rather as the conscious construction of new emotional states.
The Dadaists destroyed everything before them, with their exuberant nihilism and the only task left to do now was to create more and new ideas, states and emotions.
QuoteCertain comprehensive systems always seem to incur the anathema of individualists armed with their fragmentary theories, whether psychoanalytic or merely literary. These same Olympians, however, are happy to align their entire lives with other systems whose reign, and whose perishable nature, become more difficult to ignore by the day.
The selective nature of certain "individualists" who consistently rail against this particular system or that, while ignoring other (equally influential and powerful) systems entirely, is something that has consistently irked me, as well.
Quote from: LMNO on January 13, 2010, 03:55:18 PM
Yeah. I liked how they talked of the "spark of revolution" that was powerful enough to bring groups of people together for action; but that spark soon faded into heirarchy and politics. So (if I have this right), the thing to do was to keep looking and developing those sparks, and move on to the next thing once it's gone.
Thats how I understood it, too. Though remember, the SI concieved itself as responding to the trends and needs of a particular period only. However, for others who wish to loot the works of the SI for own ends (ie some people on this forum) it certainly seems to be a good method to use.
I'm getting pretty annoyed at the guy's writing style. Sure, he's French; sure, he's part of the Intellectualista; but damn. He's boring me to tears.
In retrospect, Vangiem may have been a better choice.
QuoteThe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
QuoteThe 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.
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.
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.
Quote from: Enki v. 2.0 on January 18, 2010, 03:50:17 AM
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.
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! (http://www.notbored.org), which is a contemporary site with Situationist leanings
Not Bored actually critiques (http://www.notbored.org/october-again.html) the book we are reading as follows:
QuoteIn 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,
Quote"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).
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?
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
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
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.
I can pdf-ize my text rip, if you like.
No, don't worry, I made another copy. I just wanted to bitch about losing the original file.
Actually, I've been thinking...I've kinda made a pig's ear of this, and its pretty understandable people might be annoyed with that.
So my suggestion is we leave this for the moment, and move onto something related, but different. There is a tract that originated in France, with some situationist influences, called "The Coming Insurrection". It is kind of a big deal in radical circles, because the text is associated with the Tarnac 9, French anarchist saboteurs who were arrested in a very high profile case on the Continent, not least because of the use of draconian anti-terrorism legislation against the 9, who never hurt anyone physically with their actions.
Also Glenn Beck pissed himself in fear when he reviwed the book for FOX News, which alone makes me curious. If anyone is interested, I'll start a new thread.
Seems pretty awesome. I'd read it. http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/
Sounds like a plan. I'll slap it onto my kindle when I get home.
PDF versions in your language of choice are officially here: http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html
Cool, I've started it, and seems pretty good so far.
Will post some first thoughts tomorrow if I get the time.
I was going to post some in a day or two as well, so I look foward to your thoughts. I was going to do some hardcore reading of it yesterday, but I was so tired the words kept running into each other on the page and I couldn't concentrate properly. I reckon we should start a new thread for it, personally.
I seem to remember the first rule of Book Club, is that we don't talk about Book Club. . . . . Or was that something else?