Situationists

Call it what you want Dev, sarky as you like; inaccurate uninformed criticism is worthy of comment, as you'd be the first to agree, I'd think - judging by the way you deal with it in other people.

To further correct; the SI explicitly rejected artistic activity and the art milieu, and their theory was centred on an analysis of class society and its abolition, for all its many faults. To portray it as otherwise is simply wrong and misleading.

Hi there,

My analysis of the SI doesn't necessarily contradict what you've just articulated, as I was looking at their members as per some of the canonical writings. I formulated it within the wider context of the social; and with use of both D and B's texts. I'm wondering what sort of textual-social conversatory evidence (that is, not a dialectical progression between theory and action to praxis, but a text extant in and around a wider social of which/where it was articulated in some sort of meaningful manner) to further nuance your claim that "their [the SI's] theory was centred on an analysis of class society and its abolition, for all its many faults. To portray it as otherwise is simply wrong and misleading."

Of course they predicated their claims on the abolition of class society, I mean, they were very schooled in Marxist though. But there is a pretty broad epistemological shitstorm with the manner of "class society" and its materiality/manifestation as they understood -or at least articulated- it. I think I've made an argument, albeit a hatchet job of one, pertaining to the removing of their base elements of 'liberatory politics' to something other than, say, extraction of surplus value.

Thanks,

I'm not very interested in defending the SI, but there seems to be an increasing amount of uninformed biased assertion being presented as fact on various subjects on these thread - which is misleading and annoying. I think you're wrong about poetry readings, street theatre etc - I see no evidence for their participation in or support of it. In fact, they explicitly criticised the 60s 'happenings' where this kind of stuff was thrown together. And where did Debord say we live under fascist ideology? And is it not the case that they said material reality, (or rather social relationships?) had become increasingly dominated (or rather mediated?) by images, not that material reality itself was images?

I really don't mean to be rude or a clever dick, but when you write like this;

then I find it harder to decipher your meaning than from anything written by the SI. If you mean where is evidence of the centrality of class struggle to their theory, I'd suggest it's on most every page they wrote. If we can't agree on that there's little left to say.

It's also hard to get your meaning in your last para.

I don't think the SI thought proles are only exploited when surplus value is being extracted in the workplace, or that that is the only site of possible contestation in this society, if that's what you're getting at.

Your reading/interpretation of the SI is very different from mine, I think you exaggerate certain tendencies in Debord to absolute conclusions he never made (or, maybe, conclusions made by others); other of your claims seem just plain inaccurate. But I still think there's useful stuff in the SI. And overreacting to the pedestal they're sometimes now put on is as pointless as reading Marx thru Stalin.

I think the only period when Debord could be said to be engaging in poetry readings and the like was when he was kicking about with Isou et al. I can't remember how much of that side was carried on when he split with them and formed the letterist international...but the situationists weren't involved with that sort of thing from what I've seen

Sorry if I came across as sarcastic. You are right about the uniformed criticism. I didn’t mention that I had actually read their works though. I agree when you say that they rejected the art milieu, and centred their theory on an analysis of class society. That doesn't mean that they actually broke away from that milieu, and weren't orientated towards it. If not why did they publish stuff such as 'The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art' as late as issue 11 (out of 12) of their magazine?

I don't think that they had any orientation to the working class even when they were writing about them. I don't think they had much in the way of politics themselves, just a few comments about art, and culture stuck on the top of SouB's political analysis.

Devrim

No problem, Dev.
The SI saw the necessity of a critique of the role of culture in capitalism - but their critique (and the article you mention) were about art, not written for artists. They wanted to abolish the role of artist as specialist/monopolist in creativity. They didn't want to create art, but a creative life for all that art was only a pale reflection of. William Morris, a communist who also wrote about art a fair bit, expressed some similar sentiments.

As for caring to have anything to say to workers - e.g., in the middle of the May 68 general strike they distributed their 'Address to All Workers'here and 'For the Power of the Workers Councils'here.

I have to agree with Red Marut on this one.

The point is that the SI for all its faults and its fairly limited output, did open up a relatively new approach to understanding modern capitalism as more than its productive 'base' and encouraged others in turn to explore the nature of commodification of every aspect of our world. They also based their views firmly on Marx's analysis and provided a useful counterbalance to the emphasis on concepts of 'bureacracy' in groups like 'Solidarity' and ' SouB'.

We should have enough humility to acknowledge the debt many of us owe to groups like the SI, 'Solidarity' and the Italian Autonomists, even though we may now have moved on and find some of their particular obsessions outdated.

Having said that my own experience of the English Situationist copycats is that they lacked both originality and any practical understanding of how to apply themselves to the real world. I am afraid that 'taking your desires for reality' in there cases just lead to insanity rather than revolution.

Hi

Not so fast comrade…

From the classic thread, “Situationist Insults for Castoriadis”, here’s my personal favourite…

Love

LR

revol if thats you being RR Berkman, could you please stop, cos its annoying.

And Devrim could you please make with the Debord story. "In the 80's in France" is a bit short on detail. Give us some dialogue. What did the fucker say/do that led you to conclude he was a tosspot?

Stand in line with your beanbags for Pseuds corner please. Anyone with tickets, straight to the front, lovely.

sorry i forgot, oxford street falsifies class

lol!

of course Sean68 and his post class muppets are actually just following through Debords spectacle to it's logic ends, like Baudrillard but slower and without the style.

If you throw out essentialism and embrace the spectacle then the logical conclusion is that there is no agency that can break beyond the spectacle (like the pessimists in the Frankfurt school realised). Afterall if you have the wit to realise that our desires are socially produced and mediated, then produced use values cannot be seperated from the exchange value mechanism that shapes the whole social terrain, and so we all slowly drift off into hyper reality.

The spectacle in it's one sidedness grants a homogenous hegemony to capital and puts the proletariat into the role of spectators, it doesn't see that the 'spectacle' itself is always already detourned, that the spectacle does not only express nothing more than societies desire to sleep but it's dreams as well.

If you throw out the reality of peoples desires then yeah -there will be no agency that can break beyond the spectacle. This however isn't taking Debord to his logical conclusion, its removing the centre of his theory.

Its not a question of separation, but of conflict. Your argument there would equally apply to the commodity in Marx.

Additionally, only a fraction of the reality of human desires ( human desires that actually exist right now, not the ideal desires of some ideal human either) actually get expressed in use-values.

The spectacle is certainly a very contradictory "thing", but if it had always already been brought back into play on the revolutionary side of class conflict, which is what the situationists meant by detourned, then life would be too easy.

Dreams eh?
How about - the spectacle expresses human dreams in the spirit of a presumptious obituary.

Back of the net.

but the whole point is that peoples desires are socially produced and if the spectacle dominates society then it dominates and shapes our desires. This is the whole drive of the frankfurt school and why they are so pessimistic.

you'll have to expand cos i'm not seeing your point? And of course the argument applies to the commodity in marx.

I don't follow what you are saying here. yes detournement is a useful concept but within the situationists writings, detournement is something brought to bear on the spectacle from the outside, there is no recognition that the very act of producing and spectating the spectacle is always already detourned.

Revol, is what you're saying that you think that no agency can go beyond the spectacle?

On the basis that "peoples desires are socially produced and if the spectacle dominates society then it dominates and shapes our desires"?

Well, if the ruling desires are the desires of the ruling class, it doesn't mean they are the only desires, anymore than it did when Marx said it about ideas.
Marx's ideas went beyond the commodity fetish, Debord's desires went beyond the spectacle.
So do mine for that matter, occasionally.

That sentence before last is an absolute fucking beauty, if I say so myself.
At first I thought I'd accidentally pulled a fast one, but its actually exactly right.

the question is where do these desires come from, afterall the spectacle is the totality?

what is it that allows desires to escape the spectacle, what are these real desires?

My problem is that i think the concept of the spectacle does not analysis how it is already riven with our desires, how the desires it articulates and produced are themselves contradictary. I'm saying that those desires that can smash the spectacle are infact part of the spectacle, that the spectacle is itself dependent on our desires.

I think what Devrim says about the S.I. is correct in its relation to class. Yes the S.I. was a small group with no observable intention to link themselves to the struggle. In a report of article that Loren Goldner a french communist also says that S.I. was not even an important factor inside the may 68 "situations". ;

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

However it is also interesting why S.I. is so attractive for the interested people. I was also attracted by debord's s. of s. and it was one of the first books that created an interest in me to search for something about councilism, left-communism etc. I think there are mainly one reason for this;

IS. is interesting because it has a very concrete and "militant" critique of commodity which is absent in middle class activist having a feeling of guit or simply searching for a social activity and having a workerist demagogy. Of course as Dauve says they take commodity as a thing in itself a relation to itself so this couse a problem in theory. Since their commodity is not the commodity of marx which exists in C-M-C or M-C-M relations and only the commoditisation of social relations, they have a theoratical failure. This is also their strenth. Unlike other statist leftist or even many semi-trotskist semi-post-modernist like s ou b, they were the most clear group criticising wellfare state, consumer society full of advirtisements and etc - ehich was probably new in that era. Was not it the consumer society that history have left behind the scarcity when the S.I. was active? In short S.I. understood necessity to criticise the so-called post-scarcity but since they did not understand what capitalism is, a value process rather than a part of it ("spactacle" ie. commoditisation of social relations) they failed to understand this as a transitiory situation giving way to the cirisis in the future...

In short ıt was understandable why the s.i. existed since historically they were living in the period where the cirisis was re-emerging but did not emerged yet. But it is hard to understand why revolutionaries stop in S.I. now and do not go further them.

BUT I should say that the aesthetical approach that situs. have developed like Detournment can be a valouble tactical tool. It is leftists who thinks that workers are idiots who can not imagine beyond "socialist realism". But detournment is also limited . In the final point to say long live workers councils does not means anything in itself.

a small note; Prole net is the best to use it as a propaganda tool ı quess.

No its not.
Again I'm asking - is this what you think, or what you think Debord thought? Cos its not what Debord thought.
I mean if you were saying Debord had a tendency to put too much emphasis on the power of the spectacle as opposed to the workers/the individual then thats different, but Debord clearly did not think the spectacle was "the totality".

I take it your not actually doubting the existence of desires.
The best way for desires to escape the spectacle is for them to be realised.

society is riven with our desires, the spectacle is the present ruling form of that society. Its the product of a conflict that it can only aspire to completely subsuming. Hopefully.

Well duh.

well they can certainly appear in the spectacle

Of course it is. Its dependent above all on stopping them meeting up with the general powers to realise them, which it owns.

Your really not getting this. 'll respond tommorrow at some stage. But i'll just say the problem with Debord is that he at once makes the spectacle a social relation and on the otherhand seems quite happy to present it as a domain of false consciousness, as appearance. This like Lukacs and Gramsci's historicism begs the question of from how and where does a system that is true to itself come to be judged false without stepping outside it, the answer is of course that the very logic of the system is driven by a central contradiction, a part that is it's ontology, it's nourishment and at the same time always it's potential gravedigger, however Debord presents the spectacle as being free of such contradiction, as a finished commodity and locates the battleground outside the spectacle.

Saying that I think trying to work in the very terminology of 'the spectacle' is a major hinderance.

The problems that are being identified here are real ones: how do we distinguish 'real' desires from the 'false' desires of 'augmented survival'? Isn't a theory that speaks of people as being 'sleepwalkers' fantastically patronising? ...And if everything is spectacle, how can we find a position to criticise from, and how can we distinguish our critique from spectacle? Looking at it in this light certainly does point towards Baudrillard's '80's stuff, hence the common claim that Baudrillard 'took Debord to his logical conclusion.'

These are real problems, and they are present in Debord's work. he struggles to give a convincing answer as to spectacular elements of the Strasbourg student union scandal; he goes to great (and extremely complex) lengths to present a mode of discourse that is distinguished from that of the spectacle (i.e. detournement in The Society of the Spectacle, writing the Comments like a puzzle, all sorts of wierdness and complexity in Panegyric), and towards the end he seems to be trying to justify his distnace form spectacle at times (in some rather unconvincing ways). So yes, these issues are certainly present, Debord recognises them, and perhaps doesn't do a fantastic job of dealing with them.

However, stressing the Hegelian aspect of the whole thing does help - and the Hegelian content of Devord's theory is really important to understanding that theory. Hegel wrote in the Philosophy of Right that "all that is rational is real; all that is real is rational." The German word translated as 'real' is 'wirklich', which is rendered better in English as 'actual'. Hegel actually makes a point of distinguishing reality from actuality in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia Logic, and refers to this notorious claim from the Philosophy of Right. For example, he points out that a tyrannical state is most certainly real - but it is not actual, in the sense that it is not an actualisation of the rational concept. History is the process of actualising the reason that is the essence of human beings, and thus arriving at freedom.

Marx makes the way in which human beings secure their means of survival into the developing movement of history. Debord rejects this, and stresses the ontology of labour and the emphasis on 'species being' in Marx's early work (although it's by no means absent in Marx's later stuff). He stresses that what is to be actualised in history is the freedom of being fully self determining (which comes from Hegel's undersrtanding of reason). His account of history is 'material' in Marx's sense, as it's to do with the real actions of real human beings, but his emphasis is not on how relations of production shape history, but rather on how human beings themselves shape themselves (Marxists may well object that there is no difference between the two - but Debord's emphasis is most certainly on developing autonomous experience, on liberating ourselves from the forces of production, rather than liberating production itself).

The spectacle is a frozen moment of history; it's real, but its not actual - its not part of the moving dynamic of human history. Instead of alienating ourselves into autonomous actions and then sublating these actions on the world into experience, the spectacle works on what he calls "spatial alienation": a kind of a-historical emptying of ourselves into a static moment.

So on this reading what opposes spectacle is the actual, and the actual is - in essence - human freedom, autonomy and historical experience. It might well (and probably will be) objected that this doesn't solve the problems identified above, but it does go some way towards indicating the ways in which Debord thought they could be overcome. Fine, there is no 'outside' to spectacle - but we don't need one, as the essence of actualising the concept is the immanent critique of appearance, i.e. identifying what is implicit within it, and making that explicit. Everything appears in the spectacle and is recuperated; we can't critcise the spectacle without appearing in the spectacle. ...but so what? If we're concerned with actualising freedom and autonomy why should we obsess about such moments anyway? They should always be sublated and moved past (as should the SI themselves). How to distinguish critique and discourse from that of the spectacle? By its intention and - ultimately and fundamentally - by its results.

Debord points towards re-thinking Hegel in a way that totally does away with the stupidly reductive and static 'dialectic' of Diamat, as it is the extent to which Hegel stresses thinking without propositions, identifying the necessary as opposed to the contingent, the essence from appearance that makes him worth looking at. Now, you can claim that any such talk of 'appearance' is a bad move as it inevitably leads to claims of 'false consciousness.'. But it doesn't have to - and any communist/anarchist/whatever political movement must always address the extent to which it stands in opposition not only to existing social relations, but also to the opinion of the vast majority of people.

I don't have a Debord story. I met him. He seemed self centred, arrogant, and couldn't handle his alcohol very well. He was very impolite to my mum.
No pearls of wisdom from the master unfortunately.

Devrim

I'd put this sort of stuff more down to a personal tiff than politics.

I thought that you were a big fan of Pallis anyway.

Oi, if anybody's going to get patronising here it'll be me.

Oh aye?

Reminds me of Marx's commodity fetish

The battleground isn't located outside the spectacle, the spectacle is located inside the battleground. The spectacle is on one side of a social and historical conflict, this conflict is not ultimately internal to the spectacle.
Revol, you're pushing a postmonernist interpretation on Debord, and basically setting up a straw man.
You were more accurate (albeit putting it philosophically) earlier on when you said postmodernism was the spectacle minus Debord/the situs essentialism.

Now Devrim i'm not looking for pearls of wisdom, but a bit of human interest. What did the brute say to your ma?

i thought i found law's spectacular times online, but the link is dead. copies seem to be available on amazon tho'.

Larry Law's Spectacular Times is mirrored here. Good read.

Just curious if people agree with this. In particular revol I'm cuious if you do. And if you agree with what 'Cardinal Tourettes' think you 'accuately' said.

not all and yeah I think the spectacle minus a certain essentialism does lead to post modernism.