Situationists

meh, i'm not to keen on their overegged spectacle and the assumption that the boom of the sixties represented the stabilisation of capitalism.

Well I'm not really able to give many criticisms of their main texts, cos I kept falling asleep while reading them and gave up. Which given that I (think) I am not a complete dunce and was actually very interested and quite excited about reading them (mainly thanks to Larry Law and Crimethinc ) is a pretty damning criticism in itself, I think.

no it's amazing, debord takes marx's aesthetic of negatively inverting statements and runs with it like a Duracell bunny with an afterburner up it's arse, it never gets tedious and really get's to the point.

Larry Law's good, The poverty of student life is good. My eyes passed over the words of 'the revolution of everyday life' and 'society of the spectacle' but not much actually sank in so i can't say i'm too keen on them.

Personally, I think their ideas were more or less accurate, although the situationists themselves had to ruin this by being pretentious cocks who needlessly obscure their own ideas and make them sound a lot more complicated than they actually are.

Every time I try reading Debord I feel sleepy and while I enjoyed The Revolution of Everyday Life, Vaneigem spends so much time trying to convince people that he's a far better writer than he actually is that he gets lost in crafting beautiful poetic language that sounds good, but is completely devoid of any real meaning.

Generally, they extended the critique of alienated labor to a critique of the worker's everyday life. Their texts can be difficult to wade through, but I think they made some insightful contributions. However, there are many texts available online (such as the introduction to the Situationist International here on Libcom and, especially, Larry Law's Spectacular Times) that provide a de-jargonized introduction to situationist theory. I think Guy Debord and the situationists actually tried to make their works, both cinematic and literary, somewhat difficult to comprehend, though, in order to prevent the reader/viewer from slipping into the role of passive consumer.

Anyway, I'm not sure whether the SI's role in May '68 is "overstated", but I believe they played a significant part in radicalizing the working-class protesters, and there's no denying that On the Poverty of Student Life was instrumental in sparking the revolt. These are just my thoughts... I think the SI made some worthwhile contributions to revolutionary working class theory.

Only tangentially related but there's a new Situ inspired text that's worth reading:

http://libcom.org/library/gasping-out-shallows-reflections-revolution-early-twenty-first-century

And also some sharp comments on them in this new piece on Loren Goldner's site:

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/roundtable.html

Both those texts probably deserve their own thread but I'm too lazy.

Good day,

I'm new here, so be gentle.

I have something of a problem with “The Society and the Spectacle,” mainly in that it was, and continues to be, a hugely influential text. Debord argued “The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.” The Spectacle, for Debord, is “capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images,” and furthermore/therefore, the "real world," -and not a Lacanian real- is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet tied to it. Concurrently, these images succeed in constantly (re)making themselves regarded/understood as the epitome of reality; something like a tangentially materialist hegemony writ crazy.

In such a world as Debord nuances, the old Marxist crime of meliorism remakes itself into a radical cardinal sin; if the “real world” is nothing but a “selection of images,” then making small changes is nothing but changing the aesthetic, decorating one’s cage. Debord is able to come to these rather stunning conclusions pertaining to the nature of society through his conflation of liberal western democracies with fascist ideology. Debord is not alone in this, Ayn Rand conflates a tragic 20th century “ism” with her contemporary America, noting that “virtually the entire program of “The Communist Manifesto” has been enacted into law in this country.” When these analyses come from the extreme-right, it seems, they sound about as absurd as they are.
Situationist inspired agitprop littered the streets of Paris during the May 1968 uprising. Most of the graffiti is pretty rousing stuff, poetic in the manner of which the French seem to be inclined; but lacking the pleonastic verbosity of the thinkers it would later -in part- inspire (although how much post-* thinking is a hangover from '68 is an open debate).

On many levels the Students of the ’68 uprising conceived, intellectually, of their class biases as proper class consciousness. In other words, workers really were not terribly interested in the base epistemological/ontological ideas that they were “sleeping,” or in the class biased manifestations of the uprising, things like free poetry recitals and naked dancing-in-the-streets; a radical “freeing of the mind” which the students desired. Workers tended to be more concerned with “bread and butter” issues; all of this notwithstanding the student/worker action which as heavily extant. Henceforth, even tough the actions of the two groups were similar and often combinatory, their ontological states were not. Workers did not seem to buy that “You can no longer sleep quietly once you’ve suddenly opened your eyes,” because they were never living in Plato’s cave in the first place (and because it is bloody pretentious and eerily condescending), and “awakening” was not their goal, a better life was.

Or I could, as is normal, be dead wrong. I still like reading their stuff though, a lot of it is very clever, and somewhat useful.

yo,

good post, especially the points about the pretentious nonsense about 'awakening' and all the other crap about 'real desires'. The problem for me is that the spectacle is too total, it is at once a cage with no outside, and yet somehow they have stepped outside to offer a critique, this is most obvious in the rather essentialist sloganeering about 'real desires' and about 'playing instead spectating'. What makes arty detournement, juggling and street theatre any less part of the spectacle than football and film, beyond the aesthetic tastes of declasse wadical students? Is it the same difference between porn and erotica? Of course Baudrillard came along and took Debord and his spectacle to it's logical conclusions, everything is recuperated, the world is suspended in hyper reality.

Indeed.

Try telling Iraqis that the Gulf War never happened, I'm sure their corpses will rot easier now. It can tend to the ridiculous, especially with Baudrillard.

The totalizing aspect of Debord's analytic is, in my extremely humble I've-actually-never-taken-a-philosophy-course opinion, indicative of most 'modern' Continentalist philosophy, especially when it comes to looking at the wider social following WWII. It is really little difference than Foucault's ideas on discourse as manifest in D & P. It also falls into the same pitfalls of logic. For Foucault, nobody (namely Enlightenment progressives, of which he was gunning for so often) can step outside of discourse, hence their attempts to ameliorate conditions were merely reflections of the dominant discourse(s) at play. The problem being of course, it that if statement A is true, than analysis B must be false, as analysis B is operative within the realm of statement A.

The situs fall into a similar category, although their cage is operatively different, and less totalizing than Foucault's. Nonetheless, I bloody well hate their progeny, specifically of the intellectual sort. Post-lefties in the academy still thinking they're being radical by reifying the inherent radical-ness of the text, or as a social movement crimethinc and their ilk. There is undoubtedly a direct correlation and connection in that chronology. And yes, C is the word of the day.

Off to write; it is three in the morning.

ahh you see it's the death of the subject.

may I recommend Zizek as an interesting remedy.

You can expect the button to call round soon and chastise you for 'not getting Foucualt', and i should expect a nice quote from "What is Enlightenment?" too.

The interesting thing is how almost all political philosophy and theory boils down to the old agency/structure/subject debate.

Bloody Hell, I really do have to get to writing, the clock is ticking. One more post...

Well, Foucault does get to these points in the History of Sexuality and in the recently published "Hermeneutics of the Subject," the latter being pretty unreadable, Zizek is another matter entirely. Originally I was pretty impressed with "Did somebody say totalitarianism?" but as I read more (Metastasis of Being in particular) I became a little disillusioned, I mean, how many different ways can one reiterate the teachings of Lacan? Well, apparently into the indefinite.

One could go the other way and get into some post-Maoism with Badiou, who is apparently making it right now a la Derrida in the American academy. Some of his shit is pretty interesting, but ultimately statist, which should come as little surprise. Indeed, Badiou is smashing this "agency/structure/subject debate" whilst unformulating "political philosophy." To quote: "By Metapolitics I mean whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which claims that since no such politics exists, it falls to philosophers to think 'the' political."

Badda Bing. It has problems, and there is a lot of pie-in-the-sky bullshit in it, but there is some solid stuff there for those who care to engage in the fucking arcane prose that riddles the French.

Zizek does seem to do a fine line in cutting and pasting his own work into a new book every other month. Still think his ideas are interesting though, and he does make Lacan comphrensible.

Badiou bored me too death, he's like a shit ZIzek with even shitter Maoist baggage, all that balls about being true to the event is just barely concealed Maoist elitism, that removes politics and struggle from the terrain of day to day class struggle and reifies into a commitment to 'truth'. Like Althusser, the show of history goes on behind the back of everday life.

And you lot accuse the situationists of pretentiousness

Seems to me that we can learn something from the situs, but the lesson has more to do with presentation and propaganda than philosophy. Everyone, from militant punk alkies to trippy hippy crusties, loved Larry Law, whereas only a tiny percentage of bed wetting, academic losers would bother to trawl through the glut of late 20th Century French psycho(geographical)babble for inspiration.

So why doesn’t more anarchist propaganda strike a chord in people? Larry gave us a great template, he showed that if we really want to reach people we need to keep things witty, well designed and to the point.

unfortunately the group that has most taken on the situ's aesthetics and rhetoric has shit politics (crimethinc)

Actually crimethinc are more postmodernist than situationist. All they’ve ever done is regurgitate other people’s radicalism in the hope that some of it would rub off on them. They are to ‘The Revolution of Everyday Life’ what ‘Scary Movie’ was to ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (only less clever).

true, but they outright nick the aesthetic, somehow missing debord's copious mentions of hegel, marx and class, as pomos are wont to do

ah but proper pomo's like Baudrillard would have jettisoned the residue of essentialism in the Situ's . Crimethinc kiddies are just zombified counter culture hippies, resurrected in a dark mass unifying Vaneigem, Marcuse and Crust into an unholy trinity.

Personally I find the situs quite amusing, and like their contemptive attitude, don't really think their politics when you strip away the extremely impressive aesthetic form they built up were that wonderful beyond being run of the mill council communists and being good at rousing students and arty types to create some trouble, although often in a somewhat activisty way, but then i suffer from not being asked or being intellectual enough to read anything beyond like a chapter or two of TSOTS, so maybe he made some interesting points at the end or something.

Oh and also there influence in may 68 is ridiculously overblown, though it is notable that after they left the sorbonne and the 'anarchist' and leftist sects gained complete predominance the place became a hippy shit hole. so i'd give them some credit.

Well Vlad and Josef took on ol' Charlie's rhetoric pretty well, but that doesn't make us disown a two class system does it? C'mon, let's think about this a sec...

I've also been told that "Revolution of Everyday Life" is somewhat distorted in English translation, and that French academia has always tended towards the more poetic in comparison with many other traditions. Doubtless Jef Costello will now pop up in order to pretend he knows something about France. I think that Vaneigem book's fuckin great, and the fact that the likes of Baudrillard are now seen as so cutting edge testifies to their continued relevance. Incidentally, claiming that he said the Gulf War never happened is a bit of a slander. Research that text properly.

In general terms, as far as I can see, Marxism and the theories of class struggle were pretty monolithic until the Situs came along to shake it up. Even now they make Jack look like a turn of the century petty bourgeois social democrat, so thank 'em for that.

utter tosh, what about the western marxism of Lukacs, the frankfurt school, and Ernst Bloch, who they ripped off. Actually they didn;t rip of Bloch otherwise ther concept of the spectacle would have been far more nuanced.

Like i was saying in reply to revol on the disoriented trotskist thread, the situationist style has (naturally enough) dated, (as well as having problems of its own for various reasons), but the theoretical/political essentials were fucking great - to me the main theoretical point of departure for any new revolutionary current, should one ever appear.

revol you're right when you say the situs were essentialist, but your being right basically ends there.

The situs did believe in real desires ( I can do without the quotes round them myself, at least in theory). So in that sense essentialist, but not in some ahistorical sense. They didn't think human desires were fixed or unmediated by society, but they did think they were real, the audacious buggers. If academia concludes otherwise, well that says it all about academia.
So essentialist in the same sense Marx was. (I just know that line's going to stir up a shitstorm. Take it to another thread Redtwister!).

What they thought was capitalism was blocking the realisation of these real desires. (It is to the extent that capitalism succeeds in this that a person is likely to start having doubts about the existence of their desires in the first place. Which is presumably at least one factor in the prevalence of such doubts amongst postmodernist philosophers, compared with say brickies.)

Theres obviously a tendency to see the situs as mainly poncy rhetoric without much substance. This is in a sense a natural tendency, given that today everything produced that is difficult to read is so just to hide the fact that it is even bigger bullshit than everything else. Faced with a complex sentence it is generally a safe bet, and saves wasting a lot of time, to assume its pish. So it is that you can end up, in a freak case, skimming over an actually accurate description of a reality that has still not quite lost its complexity.
(You can tell that I've been reading Debord eh?)

For those who think the situs didn't have much to say politically, I'd recommend something like 'Two Local Wars' - on Vietnam and the Arab-Israeli war -

http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/11.wars.htm

- see if anybody posted anything better on here on the various discussions (no, I'm afraid they have to classed as debates) about national liberation movements.

And revol and berkman, give me bloody strength - the SI were not into "free poetry recitals", "juggling" or fucking street theatre.

surely the way out of the 'real desire' trap with its false consciousness trimmings is that desires are for use-values but they are only available as exchange values, mediated by capital (indeed, accumulated to such a degree that it has become an image). consuming commodities and their associated images (brands/adverts) etc isn't 'false desire' but the only means under capital to realise our (material, and increasingly immaterial) desires. probably.

I always get the impression that they were a bunch of middle class wankers with no connection to the working class. Oh, and I am old enough to have met Debord, and that is how he came across. Alf said that had some cultural insights, but I think he is being very kind. So basically a bunch of art school tossers, who picked up some second-hand sub Trotskyists politics in the car boot sale from Castoriadis.

I don't understand why they impress people.

Devrim

In what way were the SI's use of previous theory a 'rip off'? By that measure, we're all thieves.

They used and developed theory to relate to the real movement of their time - how well is debatable, but I think some of their concepts remain useful (and the chapter in SOTS 'The Proletariat as Subject and Representation' is still a very useful historical summary and more, and a very influential one).
They also integrated previously diverse partial critiques; e.g., councilism and a critique of alienated consumption hadn't really been connected like that, to attempt a critique of the totality of proletarian life. Most theory before them, in its narrow workerism, usually considered areas such as culture & environment as neutral factors in social life. The Franfurters were an exception, but were resigned to the proles having been integrated and pacified so rarely saw those factors as sites of possible contestation.

The SI may have been at times pretentious, but it was an advance on existing theory - as many of the consequential theorists since have acknowledged; Barrot, BM Blob, Combustion, Aufheben etc. Those like the autonomists who seem to have more or less ignored/discounted the SI are often, despite some insights, still struggling with a clean break from leftism/leninism. And the critique of the robotic militant so often applied on these boards surely can be traced back to the SI, as can other concepts/terms often used such as recuperation.

The SI is also often judged too much solely on their 'classic texts' Society Of The Spectacle & Rev. Of Everyday Life. But the more topical texts, such as in the Anthology, show their analysis of contemporary events such as the Cultural Revolution, Algerian Revolution etc. And the article on the Watts riots was a real theoretical advance in analysing the diversity of forms that opposition would take.

Arguably, anarchism would have almost no recent theoretical development without the input of the likes of Solidarity and the SI, and those they influenced; it was mainly anarchists who read and distributed situ and situ-influenced stuff in the UK (at least before UK academia belatedly discovered it in the 80s, 30 yrs after their French counterparts). And I'd suggest that most anarchists were introduced in the 1960s-70s-80s to what was good in Marx/marxism via groups like Solidarity and the SI.

It almost seems like a rite of passage for cocky young 'theorists' to feel the need to show they can 'put the SI in their place' - which is itself a backhanded compliment and acknowledgement of their continued influence - or to uncriically name-drop/praise them. But very few of their detractors or worshippers bring anywhere as like as much effort, application, or convincing result to their task as the SI did to their critiques. The SI need to be criticised, but for the right reasons and with the right motives.
Cardinal; you posted while I was writing, but I don't think I duplicated you much - good post.

double post

Devrim; the last time I remember you mentioning the SI on here it was by far the most uninformed thing you've ever said - iirc you said they wanted revolution without class struggle - which strongly suggests you'd never actually read them. And even an informed detractor would hardly characterise them as 'sub-Trotskyist'. And when people dismiss others on the basis of being middle class and/or having attended art school (which I don't believe most of the SI did) it tends to show the shallowness of their critique. Marx may have been an arrogant fucker, scrounging off his factory owning bourgeois pal - but that's only worth mentioning insofar as those circumstances may have influenced his ideas. Even if you can show that, it doesn't invalidate all he said. Ditto for the SI or anyone else.

And I'm really surprised to hear you met Debord - when and where was that?

A rejoinder vis a vis Cardinal Tourettes,

First, it can be easy when cloaked in the warm shroud of anonymity to be crude with argument, fast and loose with criticism and stingy with manners, I dearly want to avoid this. The SI folks we're looking at had some interesting things to say, but one a macro level I find their shtick is deeply wanting,

You assert that the "the SI were not into "free poetry recitals", "juggling" or fucking street theatre," which has some merit, the SI were an extremely small organization. Pulling off street theater may well have been something of a non-issue, based merely on their manifest lack of personal. And I doubt either Baudrillard nor Debord could juggle, to do so they would have to a) leave their armchairs, b) put out their Gauloise and c) redefine the essence of juggling-ness-ity and the intrinsic revolutionary potential thereof first.

More to the point, the SI were advocates of such measures, and would have looked upon them approvingly. It really depends on how one interprets what the SI did; writing manifestos is not action, it is writing manifestos. It tends to be poor analytics to view events in as anatomized situations [sic] instead of interconnected within a whole. I'm not a huge fan of orthodox dialectic theory, but this is one real strength of that. All of the aforementioned being far beyond what was once semblant of the point; I'll get to it.

For Debord, consumer capitalism had run completely amok, but not in a way many of us would understand it. For him 'authentic human experiance' was no longer plausible, as everything which even resembled said was commodified by the man and sold back to the unwary proles via the fascist media. Under such a system life, existence et al is merely 'spectacle,' the world is no longer a material reality per se (although being a Marxist he does get around this, but there's no room to get into that here) but a self-promoting system of image and signifier, Saussure and Gramsci meets Freud gone batshit if you will. So in this world, things like juggling and street theatre are as, if not more authentic than, say, organizing a union because unions are just part of the spectacle, whereas the free spaces created in shit like "free poetry recitals", "juggling" or fucking street theatre," creates the sort of real, authentic cognitive dissonance needed to really 'fight the system.' These things allow us to "wake up" from the spectacle. It is the absence of the spectacle which is the endgoal, because spectacle is capitalism writ large. Hence emancipation does not entail seizing that (with)/in/side the spectacle (Industrial democracy say) but by stepping outside of its trappings in their entirety.

Remember in the Matrix, when Neo picks up the book before the following the 'white rabbit?' The book, made conspicuous by its inconspicuousness, was of course "Simulacra and Simulation." The book is the thesis of the film. There are a few 'enlightened' folks about, everyone else has bought into the system, man, and they're like, brainwashed and shit, but like, we know the truth, and that is that there is a real world beyond all the bong smoke, and that is like, where we live. Everyone else is like, stupid and shit. Which is what "Simulacra and Simulation." argues in quite a few more pages, but with more periphrastic verbosity. I do wish I could write like him, nonetheless, the prose is bloody spectacular, as is the manner of argumentation; then again, flattering the reader is always a good bet.

Yup, still not a fan.

I don't remember ever mentioning them on here, let alone saying that. I may be mistaken though.

It seems like I am being accused of some sort of crime here, not having read the situatisonists, oh my God. Actually I read a little when I was younger. It bored me to tears.

I wrote:

I don't think they had much politics of their own. What they got they picked up from Castoriadis. I don't think it is unfair to call him a sub-Trotskyist.

That is ok then as I don't think that situationism needs a deep 'critique'. Seriously though, it is not whether they went to art school, or not. It is that their politics were based around that milieu, and there activity was orientated to it. Even if they had had anything to say to workers, they never cared to.

On another thread I wrote:

I think that these things have to be said about Marx too. It doesn't invalidate all that he said, but I think that we should bear it in mind when we read Marx.

The difference between the SI and Marx is that when you pull off all the pretensious crap, they actually had very little to say. At least Marx did.

In the 80's in France. If you remember at one point I had to spend quite a bit of time their because of personal reasons. I also met Dauvé once, a much more pleasant person than Debord was, and with a little better politics (not that the two are connected).

Devrim