Book Club: Guy Debord and the Situationist International

[Cain]

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.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

I'm joining the shit out of this, as soon as I can manage to get X running again.

[Brotep]

This should make for some good discussion.

[The Johnny]

Whats the time-frame usually agreed upon to read through it?

[LMNO]

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.

[Cramulus]

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.

[The Johnny]

printer... ENGAGE!

[Cain]

I'll probably have something to comment on by the weekend.  At the latest.

[Cramulus]

wow, the introduction is dry, wordy, and full of jargon.

But it really does pick up after that!

from page 9---

The 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

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

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.

[Cain]

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.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

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.

[Cain]

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:

Tafuri 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:

It 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.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

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.

[LMNO]

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.