Abracadabrant – Encyclopédie des Nuisances

Everything that used to be part of the sphere of knowledge, its transmission and its acquisition, has disappeared into the hands of those who confiscated it. The consequences of such a strange victory must necessarily be reproduced in a chain reaction and affect a wide range of domains, and must do so in a spectacular way [“de modo abracadabrante”]. Since the announcement of the unfolding of potential disasters crowns the techno-scientific marvels of our time, and since the latter, whatever else may happen, will know no other course, now is the time to organize the confusion by making the slaves take responsibility, so as to cause them to deposit their still-embryonic anger in the test tubes of those whose job is to make it disappear.

* * *

The existence of harmful phenomena can no longer be denied. The industries and the powers that, in the fullest sense of the word, own the world have drawn the obligatory conclusions and have ostensibly taken command of the ecological struggle against these evils.

They have done so in such a manner as to unambiguously transform this struggle into the economic management of the effects of a mode of production which, for just that reason, must appear to be unvanquishable. From this recently adopted privileged and henceforth central position in domination’s strategy, the outstanding instruments for the defense of the existing reality tend to circumscribe social discontent and unease by steering it towards the electoral, managerial or lobbying cattle yards. This rabidly contemporary juggling act consists, by way of discussing generalities when quite precise causes exist as well as enemies who can be called by their names, or by the placing of blame for particular harmful phenomena when it is a question of universal evils, of making everyone responsible so that the culprits can hide among the population.

This operation became indispensable in France three or four years ago, when the first skirmishes of something like a confrontation over the truth began. Due to one thing or another, whether it was barrels of toxic waste or artificial bacteria, rancid industrial foods or nuclear waste dumps in plain sight, the official version of the facts was too easily refuted.

At the beginning it was done quite subtly, while this was more suitable for the particular reality of modern management which in a certain sense had no official version. The “counter-experts” of environmentalism made their modest contribution to democratic debate wherever they were invited, and the scanty evidence they presented, due to the simple fact of being in the company of the testimony of paid experts, was unproblematically raised to the level of hypotheses, more of the same. What was important was that the hopes of discovering the truth should be frustrated. Later, the falsifiers would try to accommodate it in their own way.

“Modesty and reserve accompany some of the most spectacular lies for the simple reason that only they allow them to be accepted,” as Chesterton observed.

When they speak of converting industry to the cause of ecology, the objective sought is obviously the opposite, and has already been partially achieved. For example, the enemy, responsible for harmful phenomena, is said not to be in industry or the public powers, because now both are responsible for eliminating such phenomena, and in order to do so, even the most obvious conclusions must literally be threatened with eclipse before so urgent a task, and the population must trust the environmentalism of authority even if, for the moment, it does not necessarily obtain any results.

The effect of a clean break produced by this tactic—ceasing to defend themselves from the accusation of being polluters and suddenly claiming the leadership of the struggle against pollution—is playing its role to perfection, so much so that the nuclear industry, having proclaimed itself “ecological” with reference to the greenhouse effect, proposes the discrete recycling (in metallurgy, for example) of that part of its wastes which, thanks to the new rules, can be declared to be non-radioactive. Thanks to examples of this kind it is easy to understand the principle task of State environmentalism: to manage the truth concerning harmful phenomena and to adapt it to the imperatives of the permanent modernization of production.

The environmental spokesperson for a Japanese political party candidly summarized it in this way: “Even if economic prosperity is incompatible with the protection of nature, our primary task must consist in working hard to harmonize them.” (Shigeru Ishimoto, Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1989).

Nonetheless, the real movement in opposition to harmful phenomena has not come to an end. In some conflicts (nuclear and industrial wastes, highway construction) the stubbornness of the struggle has persisted; the issues have become known and the movement has begun to federate local opposition groups.

But it is still under the influence of the dominant environmentalist ideas, which are reducible to just one idea: adequately managing the catastrophe. If the will to finally put an end to the catastrophe does not prevail, the whole world, with the exception of the technicians, the only ones who can discuss palliatives, are variables in the social hierarchy according to the position occupied or the position that is sought by those to whom such palliatives are proposed.

Environmentalism seeks to assume the responsibility for the entirety of human practice (of its preconditions and its effects) without confronting the separations and alignments which account for its deviations. It has the pretense of concentrating all partial knowledge in itself, considering the whole world its laboratory. But since its experts are not based on Sirius, they are divided according to easily-identifiable terrestrial interests. And the last word of scientific thought remains unspeakable.

When, for example, a “UNESCO coordinator for the environment” expresses his desire for an “ecological catastrophe” in the expectation that it would generate “a much more mobilizing effect than a whole series of disturbances of minor importance” (Le Monde, June 12, 1991), he clearly demonstrates just what he means by mobilize: mobilizing additional funds. And when a philosopher waxes poetic over “the great unknown adventure” towards which history, undoubtedly irritated by “the complexity of the world’s problems”, is dragging “the earth, a wandering orb” (Morin), we must deduce that bold captains, ready to lead such a great Odyssey, have aligned themselves with the socialist party, and with no other official thinker than himself.

In addition, this author rests comfortably in the shade of vast sociological problems on stage right, and on stage left he teaches the engineers of the Ecole Nationale how to “communicate” effectively with the local population, that is, how to deceive them (Libération, October 12-13, 1991).

But if we want to more accurately sketch this valiant troop which is crowding the halls of Salvationist environmentalism, we succumb to the temptation to borrow for a moment the “unmentionable broom” of Jarry. “An entirely grey steel jacket”, an often-recycled Father Ubu, shows the effects of his biospheric belly by shouting at each step: “Vote for my cube of green trash!” In an oracular tone learned at the Ecole Nationale of pataphysics, (1) he grows excited by the idea of definitively accommodating the “phinance” bomb with the “shit” bomb, in order to realize the closed circuit of the Ubuesque economy: “…since the environment does not give rise to commercial exchanges, no mechanism is opposed to its destruction. In order to perpetuate the concept of economic rationality, a price must be put on the environment, that is, its value must be translated into monetary terms” (Hervé Kempf, L’Economie àlépreuve de l’écologie, 1991). Oh, my stomach! Put a price on all of this, I still have not sunk my teeth of phinances into it!

And the innumerable pretenders to the role of captain Bordure line up to tell the impressionable troops that the soup is good: “The art of keeping the earth inhabitable is a matter of planetary engineering. Ten years ago this was science fiction, today it is a job” (Brice Lalonde, Le Figaro, March 11-12, 1989).

All the other jobs seem to converge in this type of occupation: the last avatar of labor when an increasingly important part of the latter is devoted to repairing its own imperfections. From the highest echelons of State-recognized environmentalists to the grassroots groups, along with the officers of the national environmental organizations, numerous are the examples of all of these variously-qualified personnel offering their services to those who have the means to employ them, that is, to those who are rendering the earth uninhabitable.

Certain changes of course, taking advantage of the new policy of transparency, have been made public without batting an eyelash, as if by mistake: “Finally, two authorities, the mayors of Lyon and Grenoble, have called upon two specialists from FRAPNA (the Rhône-Alps Federation for the Protection of Nature), Yves Perillac and Jean Françoise Noblet, to help them in their debate with their opponents on the environmental terrain” (Libération, Nov. 27, 1991).

Although the new scientific synthesis to which environmentalism aspires is still in the ideological gossip stage (in the style of the “Gaia Hypothesis”), this feature helps it to easily achieve unity, contributing to the development of a new police control.

Currently, in France, contending against harmful phenomena, the subject of a special university discipline, gives career plans a second chance or awakens new aptitudes. Thus, a certain Lagadec, who apparently has a leftist background (like most C.E.A. researchers) (2), devotes himself to instructing industrial and political leaders concerning various strategic and tactical aspects of the war that they have been prosecuting against the demoralizing effects of harmful phenomena and against the demoralizers themselves. In accordance with the advice of this new type of military advisor on the preventive or active management of technological crises, the security services, technicians, industrial and political officials, scientific experts and media spokespersons should enter into partnership, so that the whole group should ultimately stick together, dispelling suspicions and imposing itself as the faithful and legitimate servant of the general interest.

Pretending to believe that the authoritarian concentration of power is a threat to a hypothetical future, this democrat reveals his real fear when he proposes “the only solution”: “some organized citizens, a powerful life of solidarity that does not allow for deviation, against authorities swamped by the difficulties of the crisis, an atomized unstructured social body, without an advisory committee, ready for any adventure that is directed against what the authorities (including the press and the experts) propose” (États d’urgence, défaillances technologiques et déstabilisation sociale, 1988). This organized citizenry, the advisory committee upon which Lagadec relies in order to prevent any kind of anti-authoritarian deviation, is none other than the Martín Arnould (13) type of kind apparatchik, the overseer of the countryside, who takes care of agitation, ludic activities or the environment, in short, the new neo-trade unionist of this exhausting labor called survival.

One must not, however, believe that the “men of confidence” of environmentalism, when they defend “responsible” solutions in local struggles, the need for media effectiveness and of an advisory committee with specialized spokespersons, must have received particular instructions in this respect. What actually happens is that they have been educated in another manner for a long time. The kind of life that they have lived, the conditions of existence that they have found integrally available and that they have accepted without complaint, prescribe the ideas they must imperatively have which, with utter good faith and spontaneously, they imagine to be the principle part of human activity as if it were an activity of management, where they believe they have found the realization of the individual, and even individual fulfillment. Above all, this realization of the managers, which is in prosaic terms nothing but a new expansion of the bureaucratic machine, can be sublimated in the well-intentioned unanimity of the environmental state of emergency.

It would not be fair to denounce their actions as exclusively motivated by the opportunities for career advancement offered by a rejuvenated capitalism in need of a new category of advisors and managers. It is much worse than that: they have never even imagined that life could be otherwise. They are convinced that career advancement is the normal compensation for their effectiveness and their sacrifice.

It is no longer surprising that such defenders of the common cause should act as if it was a “public relations” campaign, simultaneously commercial and cultural, and that they reduce it to the manifestation of those sorts of good intentions which can gain the inactive adherence of a majority of the population.

The truth about the effects of harmful phenomena becomes, in accordance with the model opinion registered by the polls, something accepted by all and which nobody really contests: the search for authentic means, the practical consequences, the conflict, the ad hominem critique are proscribed for being an attack against the unanimity, edifyingly bland, of the general interest.

They will speak of vast abstractions (Nature, Man, Earth, and the most audacious ones will even speak of “productivism” or “technoscience”), or insignificant details which go to the heart of the “concrete” (which for them amounts to the same thing). But they will speak as little as possible about who is really the enemy, who are its agents, what are their methods and their goals. Instead, they will prove that they are all democrats and will remove themselves from the fight for reasons of “credibility” but also for the sake of the enemy, because it is necessary for negotiation to re-establish the consensus so insistently demanded, as if nothing had taken place. Such “opposition”, of course, cannot be effective, even in its dreams, unless it throws the publicity bomb, which will shortly become its only strategy. The local population, the real opposition which surrenders to this script, may be liberated from some harmful phenomenon or be protected from it, or maybe not, but it is certain that it will be dispossessed of its struggle. “By means of the image with which one complacently conforms, it can practically be contained from a distance” (Complément d’enquête sur un engagement différe, Comité de acción de Serre de la Fare, January 1990).

The particular evil that must be suffered will be inflicted elsewhere, that is, upon one’s next-door neighbors, while the general malady which causes the particular one, that of being separated from all decision-making power, will continue.

While the environmentalists will basically act like responsible managers and are organized according to the model of the pressure group or lobby, at the commanding heights of industry the executives act like environmentalists and adopt the methods of the pressure group or lobby. “Fourteen large industrial groups have just formed Businesses for the Environment,” an association devoted to supporting joint actions in the environmental field, but also to defending its point of view.

The Association’s president is the manager of Rhône-Poulenc, Jean-René Fourtou. As Jean-René Fourtou reminds us, the Association’s corporate founders, operating primarily in the dirtiest industries responsible for most pollution, now spend more than 10 billion francs per year on the environment. But he has also emphasized that the Association intends to act as a lobby with regard to the authorities, not only the French but also the European, especially in elaborating regulations and legislation on the environment (Libération, March 18, 1992). The negotiations taking place behind the scenes, among experts, industrialists and politicians, are related in principle to the official homogenization of harmful phenomena, and to the definition of the thresholds of harmfulness and to the standards which must consequently be adopted.

It is in these negotiations that State-sanctioned environmentalism finds its privileged field of application: the labor of apportioning and eventually restricting harmful phenomena in a sustainable way (sustainable for the economy, above all). And no industrialist from any sector will ever complain when some minor crime paralyzes it, if the restrictions that State-sanctioned environmentalism seeks to implement open up a new market, which would certainly be all the more beneficial were the standards mentioned above to be the ones that they had created and are now defending. “…[T]he F.R.G. has appropriated the ‘acid rain induced death of the forests’ theme by transforming a real environmental problem into a commercial strategy, focusing the debate solely on the causes of automobile-related pollution…the standards established in Brussells (vehicular pollution standards cannot be met without electronic fuel injection systems, whose world leader is Bosch, and catalytic converters, whose leading European manufacturer is Dasgussa), have been transformed into windfall profits for Bosch and Dasgussa” (Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1989).

Another good method for apportioning harmful phenomena so as to program their dilution into the imperceptible (along the lines of the nuclear model and low doses of radioactivity), consists in exporting polluting industries and toxic wastes to countries which a recent report written by experts at the World Bank, inventing a new and more accurate standard of measurement, defined as “under-polluted”.

The indignant outcry which greeted the insinuation that one should “encourage a more significant emigration of polluting industries to less-developed countries” was doubly hypocritical: first, because this is what is being done and what will continue to be done; second, because the economic calculus upon which such a proposition is based is the logical corollary of that environmentalism of the economy that “puts a price on the environment”.

Air quality is of no use where there is no market for it (environmentally motivated consumers, standards, credits, that is, a pollution-abatement industry and, finally, profits) which would ruin it so as to create the need for a market for quality, a new extension of the commodity form which its greatest critic could not foresee: “Something can have use value without having value. It just needs to be useful for man without being the result of his labor. Such as the air, the natural grasslands, a virgin soil, etc.” (Capital).

Torn from their extra-economic existence by pollution, the remaining natural conditions are being brought to market, so as to be assessed at their fair market value. In the United States, for example, a sort of stock-exchange has been organized where corporations either buy or sell “pollution rights”, depending on whether they exceeded or fell short of “normal” pollution quotas established by the State.

Even if the battle against harmful phenomena has led to various economically profitable operations, it must not be forgotten that, even in this case (not to mention the disasters that are simply ignored by the official reports on harmful phenomena), we are still far from the measures which a minimal realism would have dictated. In respect to, for example, the gases which are responsible for the disappearance of the ozone layer, industrialists, after having denied this phenomenon for 15 years through their paid experts, now that they have prepared the substitute products, pressure the State to come to a decision as soon as possible.

But such haste is, however, excessively moderate when measured against the non-economic emergency, because even if the production of CFCs were to be immediately and completely terminated, the compounds that are now present in the atmosphere will continue to slowly devour the ozone for another thirty years; so, nothing will come of this but to reduce the production of CFCs in 1999 to half the 1986 level, in accordance with the Montreal Protocol of September 1987.

As for the famous “greenhouse effect”, it is used as an argument primarily by the nuclear lobby. It is clear that for it to prevail, the consumption of fossil fuels will have to end, which the entire world considers to be hardly viable in modern society, as bound as it is by its motorized chains (see our article, “Aberration”).

An Assistant Secretary of the United States Environmental Protection Agency has proclaimed, without making too much of an ecological fuss, the last word of the ruling reflection on the topic: “For good or for ill, Americans are married to their cars” (Libération, February 22-23, 1992). And they have had many children, to judge by the design of some natives who have taught us to admire them.

La Republica has provided the best summary of the situation with its sensational headline on November 12, 1991: “The Earth is heating up again, but Bus is opposed.”

As extensive as nature’s resources and as adaptable as human nature may be, they cannot both be adapted to the indefinite prolongation of the current mode of production, so others will have to be found. This delirium, not without its “ecological” justifications, now counts on getting some initial result that is illustrative enough of its future success.

The failure of the attempt to construct an artificial ecosystem (“Biosphere II”) that we have previously discussed, has proven that, in matters of “prototypes”, the development of an excessively simplified environment almost immediately escapes its inventors.

But other experts, posing the problem in an even more radical form—“the root for man is man himself”—attempt to adapt man to unbearable conditions, by genetically modifying him: the “Hugo” project of deciphering the human genome openly points in that direction, with the help of commercial patents. One can easily foresee the new disasters implied by such an enterprise of managed mutation, which only expresses humanity’s final dispossession, which includes that which previously constituted its irreducible biological identity.

This irrealism cannot itself disturb the social layers that State environmentalism and its techno-strategy are trying to seduce: it is their habitual element. These wage workers or neo-courtiers, although not lucky enough to put themselves beyond the reach of the harmful phenomena that affect everyone, even if they think that they have, if they take holy communion often enough, through the kind of activities they perform, with modernist ideology, they can nourish the hope that the social system will satisfy their demand for a “good quality of life”.

They therefore want to be consumers, since they also believe themselves to be favored by fate: they are content enough with their work, which they think they have chosen, just as they believe they have consciously chosen the commodities set before them at each stage of the programming of their needs. All the dissatisfaction of these customers of the Greens can be reduced to one demand: the commodity, of course, but without its bad side.

The only “Green” municipal councilor in Paris, when asked if his party had an alternative plan for the restructuring of the ZAC Tolbiac (in the ancient tongue, the final destruction of the Left Bank of the Seine), naively replied: “We do not have the financial means at our disposal to elaborate one” (Libération, November 13, 1991).

The historical destiny of environmentalism will not of course be that of social democratic reformism. It will not even be capable of devoting itself to repairing the evils that it has dared to denounce. All it will do is participate in their allocation, and thus also in their concealment. Their activity will have no effect on the course of the general catastrophe. From now on there is no way to escape the coming decline, but it will be decorated with their insipid jeremiads and their fake indignation, as hackneyed as the left-Christian lamentations of Le Monde Diplomatique.

Environmentalism does not “revalorize” work, but contributes to diluting it in the fog of parodic activities that represent, in a necessarily creative way, the simulacrum of a destroyed social life (see our article, “Abrenuntio). It is also capable of maintaining circles of influence in politics and industry, where it is useful to preserve the fiction of a general interest. Its experts are accepting decorative positions, and will serve on request as stage props for the new “transparencies”. It confers a sense of vitality to spectacular propaganda and its political personnel, but without managing to entirely compensate for the widespread lack of belief in the former or the scorn in which the latter are held. It will not be long before one cannot distinguish between the two.

The issues addressed in such an abstract and confused way by environmentalism are no less real however unrealistically they are addressed. As an independent force that dictates men’s conditions, nature has been defeated.

This defeat, which this century’s end is making plain to see, is, however, of no avail. The wealth that the economy produces is put entirely at its disposal; the misery that it creates remains entirely beyond the reach of its solutions. Everything confirms this in the current stage of the precipitous decline in the standard of living. Production, in its entirety, is no longer legitimized by its social use and becomes suspect. It is for this reason that harmful phenomena are discovered everywhere, whereas they had not been noticed before.

The spectacle can, as if it were a matter of victories that should be entered to its account, recall that for better or for worse, life goes on: in the French countryside the meadow grass still grows in the spring, no nuclear power plants have exploded, children are still being born, etc. But each individual, however deprived he may be of the necessary means for an exact knowledge and is therefore limited to suspecting, sees unavoidable disaster oozing from every pore of this society.

When the latent consciousness of an era combines the confirmation of the constant impoverishment of the world of man by the market economy with the feeling of being increasingly more subject to this impoverishment, a historical threshold is on the verge of being crossed. In 1985 we wrote that “the abstraction of such an impersonal system of domination, where the leaders hide behind the experts and the experts hide behind technological imperatives, continues to protect it from the rejection that it inspires, wherever people become aware of the fact that as the years pass, a large part of their former way of life has been lost. Since there is no one at hand to blame, people resign themselves to despising the world without fighting against it”. This protection sustained by all the half-experts and semi-critics who perpetuate abstraction and impersonality through inapplicable denunciations, in which it is never clearly said who is to blame or even who they think is to blame, this protection is therefore a factor promoting a growing weakness.

With respect to this kind of useless generality, it suffices to recall that “indignation which bristles against impersonal circumstances, and which therefore does not treat them as if they can be attacked and modified, is soon exhausted” (Provisional Notice Concerning Our Offenses Against the Despotism of Velocity) (4); and that as a result, those who devote themselves to repetitive indignation or make a show of it without ever bothering to formulate concrete denunciations or participating in exemplary struggles, do not even rise to the level of the generalization about the person who is “like the hawk that ascends to the heights to await the rabbit it will strike” but is more “like the bird that falls from the sun because it is too hot”.

No scientific proof can by itself convince anyone to act against these imposed conditions; nor are moralizing reproaches able to do so. The unhappy consciousness of catastrophe is aware of its impotence, and does not take the next step. Since it does not stimulate much interest, it will not waste an opportunity to complain about the faint echo generated by its warnings. In order to attempt even the least modification in the spirit of the times, it is still proper to distinguish some of their principle configurations, in their baffling arrangements, in which the feelings of the past undergo a change of significance.

The freedom to act unconsciously is the freedom granted by the spectacle, which makes it more popular. As a result, the continuous labor of destruction that makes this possible appropriates various evil passions long ago claimed by the revolutionary movement as the very expression of negation.

The spectacle is very careful not to propagandize openly in favor of these passions, since it does not need to do so; the evil passions referred to above propagandize in favor of the spectacle. Madness, granted a dynamic status by the president of the Rhône-Poulenc gang, the fire-proof Fourtou: “The mad reasoning of the project prevails over the good reasoning of the budget…. The motor of the company is the vitality of the project, not that of accounting” (Le Monde, February 18, 1989); the conspiratorial passion, now the rule in domination and the one that has animated those pioneers, the French pro-nuclear forces, from the beginning; the contempt for what exists and the declared taste for illegality—“we need rogues”, the owner of a large company told the press, shocked by the negligence and conformism of his leadership team and therefore obligated to publicly announce such a curious advertisement (Le Monde, March 27, 1991); rapid and permanent motion—“Quickly” is today’s slogan for the “decision makers” of the useless, drugged by deadlines, the leaders’ conscious adventure, or more precisely what remains of that adventure, of navigating blindly and taking risks.

In fact, all of these positions converge in a kind of vertigo of irresponsibility mimetically proclaimed before a world in full regression. The arguments of desperate lucidity have never been so convincing, because they have always remained anchored there, together with the motives of living and pleasure. But the moment we confront is such that, what such arguments deplore is now part of the ordinary themes of the most highly-evolved submission, which considers the precipitation of the data of disaster as one more reason to “live for the moment and enjoy existence”.

To a lucidity so lacking in a sense of what is offensive that it actually embraces the latter, one must also add the platitudes of an era in decline.

Domination has set the world on fire and man’s feelings have been transformed. From a passage of a recent book on the greenhouse effect: “The die is cast. We have boarded a bobsled that is ready to go down the chute.” “Last call has sounded in the gardens of the West,” as an author from a previous era put it more soberly while contemplating the beginning of our era.

Vanguard unconsciousness flirts with the idea and even becomes excited at the prospect of a few “crazy years” and the revelry it expects to enjoy. The least complacency regarding this issue signals a kind of twilight acquiescence in the process as a whole. In 1948, when the threat of nuclear weapons quickly overshadowed any kind of apocalyptic lyricism, André Breton wrote, with reference to modern poetry, about “the temptation of the end of the world,” to which modern poetry has been committed for a century, and of its own accord, which is also “the leading edge of modern sensibility”: “And yet I have no qualms about saying that this is an end of the world that we no longer want…. This end of the world is not ours. As long as it remains a possibility, we have no compunction about doing an about-face with regard to this issue, to proceed deliberately to an inversion of sign.” (The Lamp in the Clock)

The irrationality of the current form of organization of life, whose expression is harmful phenomena taken as a whole, and the impotence of all political representation to mitigate it, are the two concrete sides by which the practical movement of opposition to the activities of the ruling class can discover its universal content. If it unifies the critique of these two sides, finding reasons in the first, and means in the second, it will then be capable, in the coming years, of posing the social question in its true terms, or will at least contribute as much as possible to such a task (see our Appeal to All Those Who Would Rather Eliminate Harmful Phenomena than Manage Them, June 1990).

To boldly approach the problems of real life by unequivocally asserting that they are insoluble within the existing social domain, constitutes the qualitative leap of negation, necessary everywhere, which as an alternative does not seem to be within the grasp of the conflicts of the moment, not because the possibility of such an approach is unknown—the social question comes up in all conversations about harmful phenomena and the question of harmful phenomena comes up in all conversations—but, simply because it has never been done.

There are no precedents, and this is what is missing. But there is no lack at all of what is needed to create a precedent. The electoralist imposture of the French ecologists will lead them to Mitterandism, and shameful discredit.

When they come into contact with institutions they will become as biodegradable as the German Greens had previously become, or like that Armenian leader who declared that being a state official, he had to reopen a deadly factory which he had previously managed to shut down when he was an ecologist.

Those who still wish to remain ignorant of the nature of modern power and its activities, will have to accept a quite depressing reality which, on the other hand, is not so new: “In the most democratic and impersonal field of action possible, where the sovereign public, meeting in shareholders assemblies, hires and fires in accordance with statutory procedures, an oligarchy as closed as that of Venice has formed within the space of a generation. Three hundred men, who all know one another, direct the economic destiny of the continent and seek successors from their own ranks” (Walther Rathenau, Neue Freie Press, 1909, quoted by Benoit-Méchin, Histoire de l’Armée Allemande). We now know, some members of the CEA finding out later than others, just how much stronger this modality of power has become.

The increasing disorder of the era is the consequence of a malaise which is far from unfounded. On the one hand we note that none of the old norms of human activity, defined independently of individuals (whether religious, economic or scientific) can regulate and rationally order that activity in the current stage of development of its means; on the other hand, precisely because that same development is going disastrously out of control, there are those who resort, for lack of anything better, to arguments based upon now-dead ancient systems of rules, which leads to various regressions, whether towards morality, the invocation of “nature”, or even juridical or religious illusions.

Environmentalism embraces it all, and contributes its own techno-bureaucratic ambition of regulating and re-establishing order in its own way, transforming itself, as the science of the generalized economy, into the new thought of domination. “Either us or chaos”, the Ecolocrats and recycled experts say, promoters of a totalitarian control which exists thanks to them, in order to place themselves in the front ranks of the coming catastrophe. So that it will therefore be them and chaos.

From the journal Encyclopédie des Nuisances, No. 15, Paris, 1992.

Notes

1. A science invented by Alfred Jarry, who studied the laws ruling exceptions. The paragraph imitates Ubu’s manner of speaking, Jarry’s character who symbolizes the arbitrary vulgarity of power.

2. Commissariat de l’Energie Atomique.

3. Municipal deputy from Puy and Vice President of “SOS Loire Vivante”, small-town social climber, militant of environmental quality with an eye to the media and tourism, ecologist without principles, bought and paid for, worthy representative of the impotence of those who see no other alternative to degradation than vain lamentation or garbage collection.

4. Published in Spanish by Virus Editorial in June 1999 together with the Appeal to All Those Who Would Rather Eliminate Harmful Phenomena Than Manage Them, quoted above.

Compendium – Encyclopédie des Nuisances

The Situationist International and its historical activity are the subjects of two books recently published in France (Jean-Françoise Martos, History of the Situationist International, Paris 1989; Pascal Dumontier, The Situationists and May ‘68, Paris 1990). These books at least possess the importance which they owe to their subject: the SI, during the period which had seen the rapid modernization of domination in France, had in effect been the principle collective attempt to formulate and communicate a critique of the new conditions which had become established, and indisputably the most consequential. To prove this one need only turn to the twelve issues of the SI’s journal published from 1958 to 1969. But historical works, insofar as such works exist, can take advantage of the time which has passed and the distance opened up to analyze the development of this critical activity in its relation to the real historical movement of which it claimed to be the general theoretical expression; and to evaluate, for example, in the light of its effective outcome, in what respect its thought was ahead of its time (Karl Korsch’s text Marxism and Philosophy remains a model for this kind of analysis).

Before examining the two books in question in order to determine what value they have in this sense, we will call attention to a problem to which these historians devote no attention, but which nonetheless seems of importance to their task. The Situationist critique was originally conceived in order to impose, in a “race” with power, an emancipatory use of the new technologies developed by the latter (twenty years later, Debord still defined this period as that of a “confrontation concerning change”). Knowing that it “was forced to travel the same road as its adversaries”—the road of the complete transformation of the entire old bourgeois edifice—the SI wanted “to disseminate another idea of happiness” by putting forward “certain new values of life”: constant mobility, the derive, obscurity. As Debord pointed out in 1957 concerning surrealism, “the task of an enterprise of this nature is not to be correct in absolute or relative terms, but to attempt, during a particular period of time, to catalyze the desires of an epoch.” It must be admitted that, as far as the SI was concerned, this period of time was particularly brief: more or less from “the Strasbourg scandal” in 1966 until shortly after May 1968. The “new epoch” announced by issue No. 12 of their journal had contemplated the extension of the situationist critique, its translation into practice by a revolutionary current, but nothing of the sort happened. For from that moment, and the most profound cause of the progressive practical paralysis of the SI and its then-numerous followers is probably due to this fact, the desires of the epoch, confronted by the acceleration of the authoritarian transformation of everything, began to crystallize around different values which were often contrary to those which had been emphasized by the situationist program. What has attracted most peoples’ aspirations since then, when they have not abjectly submitted to the imperatives of modernization, was the obvious and secret necessity of rescuing the continuity of human history (its memory, its language), and in the first place the elementary preconditions for life, from permanently imposed innovation. Nothing sheds more light on this complete inversion of the value imputed to change than a comparison of two statements made by Debord, separated by an interval of more than thirty-five years: “Everything which maintains anything contributes to the work of the police”; “When ‘being absolutely modern’ has become a special law proclaimed by tyranny, what the honest slave fears more than anything else is that he might be suspected of being anchored in the past.”

Through all kinds of hardly avoidable disorientations and mystifications, the consciousness then began to develop (in France, after the end of the sixties, that is, relatively late) of having passed the point when technological innovation could have been corrected, and reoriented in a liberating sense, and that it was a question of making the obstruction of its mindless race a matter of the highest priority. And it was precisely that aspect of the SI where it had shown itself to be ahead of its time—its attempt to formulate a passionate program for the material change of the conditions of life—which became a step backwards in regards to its ability to provide the resistance to this alleged progress with its historical reasons. To give only one example, the perspective “of a whole universe pillaged by the Workers Councils” (IS No. 12, September 1969) was even then naturally inadequate for the arousal of much enthusiasm, if indeed it could ever have been, when others, more lucid in this regard, had already denounced the pillage of the universe effectively being carried out by the owners of industry. Dissatisfaction was still the reality from which the theoretical critique had to begin once again. But to do so it had become necessary to recognize it under the new forms which it had adopted. To the contrary, the majority of those who had adopted the positions of the SI during that epoch remained perfectly indifferent to all these new problems, which they complacently judged to be vain under the pretext that those who expounded them generally did so using terminology clumsily derived from various ideological archaisms.

It must be added in this connection that the historical explanation offered in 1972 concerning the nullity of the pro-situs, while precisely describing the general social conditions which determined their passive adhesion to what had become for them “an absolute and absolutely useless ideology”, forgot to consider dialectically just what it was in the theory and practice of the SI which had facilitated such passive adherence and such uselessness. The fact that the supporters of the SI’s theses were not capable of developing them and transforming them into a practical force, even in an epoch as favorable as the one immediately following 1968, obliges one to search for the obstacle to the development of situationist theory in that theory’s origin, in its emphasis on permanent change as the passionate motor of subversion, in its idea of the infinite richness of a life without practice and the consequent discredit attached to the partial character of all positive realization. To speak in this connection of error would be futile, because one must see that this “error” was inevitable, imposed as it was by the necessities of the negation of art and politics. This demolition work, with its consequent valorization of a life dedicated to the ephemeral, was historically necessary; and it fully corresponded to Debord’s personal genius. But this project, which sowed the seeds of the psychological foundations of “disincarnate radicalism” among the situationists (a recurrent phenomenon in the SI’s history right up until its end) was only a transitory task, a secondary process in the general development of a movement of subversion which was only in its beginnings. “Every partial process tends to go beyond its limits (as defined by its nature) and to imprint its tactics, its thought, its watchwords and its morale on the entire historical movement which it unleashes. The means turn against the end, the form turns against the content” (Trotsky, Our Political Tasks). The experience of the emptiness of everyday life, the program of its supersession, had been a journey, rapid and disorderly like youth soon lost, toward a renewed revolutionary activity, but the journey and its velocity could not serve as the standard for that activity: it had to be durably inscribed on reality, for which it had to be re-appropriated, completed and corrected by a collective extension. And those methods which had served to raze one terrain (that of culture) were useless or even harmful when it was a question of constructing another terrain, that of “a revolutionary organization of a new kind.” By mentioning all of this we do not intend to moralize a posteriori; the difficulty in finding a concrete terrain of action and the appropriate working methods marked the whole history of the SI (witness the periodic denunciation of passive nihilism and, symmetrically, of premature attempts at positive realizations) and had already become fully apparent already before 1968 (see Debord’s report to the 7th Conference of the SI in June of 1966), finally leading to the pious vows of post-68: predictions concerning councilist organization, etc. In reality, the “goal of the situationists”, “the immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life, through the passage of deliberately unconditioned perishable moments” (Debord, "Theses on Cultural Revolution", IS No. 1, June 1958), was certainly achieved, but only by Debord, as a brilliantly conducted individual adventure, and reaffirmed against the collective debacle of the SI.

Martos is obviously far from confronting these problems. After having totally unwound the spool of its teleology (“the essence” was there since 1953, and later underwent nothing but “an always more coherent formulation” or “the smallest correction of certain essential notions”), and fastidiously transcribing quotations and demonstrating his virtuosity in the use of inverted commas, he martially concludes: “The hostilities will continue”. Who will start them, how, on what terrain, with what arms? The historian has nothing to say concerning these questions, or about what might, even indirectly, have something to do with the problems of the present: in his little yellow volume, history only exists to confirm dogma, and this string of confirmations represents the sole meaning of his book. Such a work can undoubtedly serve neither the ends of vulgarization nor of propaganda: it is so boring and academic that it instead runs the risk of driving the younger generations away from situationist theory (it therefore falls far short of what Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surrealism was in its day). The sole function of this pensum [school assignment imposed upon a student as punishment—translator’s note] thus appears to be that of over-abundantly illustrating the judgment which we had propounded in 1988, concerning other historical works by the same gentleman, about his use of scissors and glue (see our article "Abonnir").

Despite various inept oversights (among others, he alleges that Debord had “reproached Marx…for the abandonment of philosophy”), one of them especially astonishing (the description of a letter signed and published by Gérard Lebovici as “falsely attributed” to the latter), Dumontier’s book is better. It is a “research work carried out under the auspices of the University of Nanterre”: dedications, acknowledgments, the opening of “new fields of interrogation”, it lacks nothing. But this distancing of the university researcher paradoxically allows Dumontier to get closer to his object: not being paralyzed by respect, he arrives at some conclusions which the other author absolutely does not permit himself. There is, however, a great distance between these conclusions and an historical comprehension worthy of the name.

The first and most important of these conclusions is that, with respect to its declared ambitions, the SI failed in a great part of its historical task, a part which it had itself justly considered to be central: to contribute to the construction of a modern revolutionary movement. For this fact, Dumontier offers an explanation based on the usual tautological model: the SI failed because it had not succeeded (at the moment of extending its influence beyond the student milieu, of renewing itself theoretically, etc.). It would be more interesting and more precise if he would tell us not why the SI failed (if one is to remain on this level of generality one could just as well content oneself with blaming the weakness of the social movement as a whole), but why it failed in just the way it did, among all the possible ways it could have failed. This matter is all the more worthy of attention insofar as the SI effectively managed to avoid the usual fate of vanguards: comfortable retirement. Such a relative success cannot be presented as the ne plus ultra except at the price of a triumphalism which Debord still reaffirmed in 1979, and according to which, along the lines of the Marxist justifications of the liquidation of the First International, the power of the revolutionary movement rendered the existence of a separate organization useless in advance. In fact, the validating historical justification for the SI’s dissolution, just as in the case of many previous exclusions, was nothing but an obligatory defensive measure: in the weakened and exposed position it found itself in the years 1970-71, it was the best method of damage control. It was necessary to bring down the curtain quickly and gracefully, under the penalty of a shameful finale. But why had it come to that? What could have been done differently so as to achieve different results, etc.? Even beyond the interest such questions could have for anyone who wants to launch an historical action today, they are not idle. Because although it is improbable that the course of history could have been fundamentally altered, it is certain that another way of proceeding, one granting less space to that “rigor which sanctifies itself in its own eyes” whose influence has been so baleful, would have been able to leave the future a more useful example. The inevitable part played by misunderstanding in all historical influence has on the contrary become truly exorbitant due to the persistent insufficiency of the critique of situationist mythology. (One of the most pertinent texts in this regard is the “Communiqué concerning Vaneigem” of December 1970.)

Dumontier offers some elements to answer these questions, but he does not bring them together in a truly historical analysis. Thus, he indicates that, concerning the “Minimum Definition of Revolutionary Organizations” adopted in 1966, “this definition is conceived in such a way that it is ultimately a matter of the SI proclaiming itself to be the only modern revolutionary organization.” The problem was, rather, as was immediately seen at the time, that as a “theoretical model” this definition was just as inadequate for what the SI itself was at that time, as it was for what the SI had to do. The SI had asserted in many ways that it wanted to contribute to the construction of a new revolutionary movement, whose formation depended, according to the SI, on the progress of the self-organization of the proletarians, and on the theoretical and practical unification which the latter made possible. (On the other hand, this notion had always cohabited in the SI’s formulations with some much less historical conceptions.) But with this “Minimum Definition” the SI implicitly put itself in the place of the future revolutionary organization about which it had spoken. It thus fostered a de-dialecticization of critical activity (fixation of the organization in an admirable present, disconnection from the real historical movement), which was to progressively sterilize, within the SI and among its supporters, theoretical and practical invention.

Criticizing politics without preoccupying itself much with the means of its revolutionary realization (except under the distant form of the Workers Councils), situationist theory remained underdeveloped in all which concerned tactics, the search for mediations, as much outside the SI (the process of encounter of a radical theory in formation and a fragmentary and incomplete radical practice) as within it (the methods of organization which favor the coherent appropriation of the critique). The myth of the total fusion of theory and practice, supposedly realized in the SI, and its “historical” corollary, a revolution which was to realize this fusion on the scale of society and all at once, weighed heavily upon the development of a precise intelligence of what the situationists really had to do together. As Brecht said: “What is democratic conduct? Conduct which makes democracy possible, not one which teaches democracy.” And four years after that famous “minimum definition”, those who had declared themselves against all conservatism of the glorious image of the SI would still be demanding “an exact definition of the collective activity within the Situationist International organization, and of its effectively possible democracy” (Debord, Riesel, Viénet, "Declaration of November 11, 1970").

The problems already broached by Debord on two occasions (his Report to the 7th Conference of the SI, and the theses on organization of April 1968) not only remained unsolved after the revolutionary crisis of May, but became more serious. The SI’s own success during those weeks, that is, its ability to communicate the principle points of its program at the moment of its historical verification, in effect posed new problems, which in turn complicated the old ones which remained unresolved. In the period immediately following May ’68, the SI simultaneously found itself facing the victory of its ideas and the defeat of its mode of organization (on the other hand, the latter had been suspended de facto in May, and it was just this fact which had permitted the SI a certain effectiveness.) The extreme slowness of the maturation of the latent crisis after 1966 above all demonstrated, beyond the “inter-subjective” problems, the difficulty of concretely relating the deficiencies it had observed to an analysis of the new tasks of critical activity, and of the way in which everything which had in the past served the SI’s project now harmed it. Limiting its attention to the various deficiencies of those who were not at the heights of the image of the SI only perpetuated this image which had to be destroyed. That which had to be historically redefined after the May movement, in accordance with the new revolutionary necessities and the new relation of forces, was the criterion for judging deficiencies and capabilities, and this task was passed over by erasing numerous features which the SI should have been developing the whole time, above all by abandoning a certain “rowdy” style, which really missed the point at a moment when the whole earth began to tremble.

The employment of bluff, which had been useful to the SI in order to make itself heard, evidently does not reveal a vulgar imposture, but rather a dialectical anticipation which Stanislaw Jerzy Lec succinctly defined in this fashion: “Do we have the right to separate ourselves from the truth? Yes, if it is in order to bring ourselves beyond it”. One must add: and if it is done in such a way that one allows oneself to be reached by it afterwards. Anticipation is only useful for a certain time, or rather that which is anticipated varies with time, and the old short-cuts become parking lots. In order to prevent its advance beyond its time from becoming an advance of specialists, by rejecting for example the demand for the universality of communication which had formed the basis of its project against the official arts of non-communication, and thereby re-enacting the sclerosis of surrealism, the SI should have, after the May events, renewed its program from the early 1960s—refusing to “take into consideration any problems which were not already felt by the whole population”—making a sharp break with its old ideas and methods, pitilessly distancing itself from everything in its formulations which had amounted to nothing but vain promises and useless predictions. That attitude had certainly not been a bad condition to display during a previous phase, along with everything this apparent unrealism entailed, a scandalous anti-political aplomb based upon the certainty of the possible revolutionary simplification of all problems; a certainty which was itself based upon the experience, a constitutive moment of the SI, of a dialogue among autonomous individuals which arrogantly scorned all the problems of the dominant society in order to pose instead the question of the use of life, and answered this question with the demand for its full use through play, uninterrupted creation and the realization of art. The first situationists had thus been capable of formulating a new revolutionary program; if they had been more attentive to the means required for its realization, they would not have been able to formulate its objectives so liberally. At that time, the acute assertion of a total program was itself a means (of seduction, of summons) and as for the rest it sufficed to make vague allusions to the radicalism of the revolutionary workers. All these qualities which were suitable for that time must however not be transformed into their opposites by the historical movement when, on the one hand, the simple proclamation of a total program that was supposed to be spreading everywhere, remained without any use except that of “sparing itself all the difficulties and all the little historical risks of its realization” ("Communiqué concerning Vaneigem"); and on the other hand, the problems of the dominant society, with the frenetic decomposition of life as survival, could no longer be ignored (in the name of the life to be constructed) without depriving the revolutionary project of all concrete and universal content. The radical simplification of all problems, as method and as program, was transformed into a crude mystification, a caricature of the totality and the consolidated image of a future where “the vulgar problems of real society and of the revolution will be instantly abolished before even having taken the trouble to take them into consideration” (Ibid.). Likewise, the audacious conviction of the central historical role of the SI was transformed into the comfortable certitude of being the gold standard of the art of living, the center from which the value of the rest of humanity would either rise or fall, measured, as is the case with any snobbery, by its more or less faithful similarity to what the SI presumed itself to be, or at any rate to its conventions.

The central error of the SI after May 1968 was that it wanted to reinforce itself (by means of the quantitative extension as well as the complacent perpetuation, for its audience of that time, of a style whose exhibited mastery was almost solely restricted to Debord himself), without having previously carried out the critique of its past and the redefinition of its tasks for the coming period. This “error concerning organization” was also a “complete error concerning the conditions of historical practice”, as was demonstrated by the lack of realism which characterized the internal debates of the SI from 1969 until its dissolution: between the majority of its participants and their comprehension of the new conditions, of what each one of them could do in the latter, was interposed the fiction of their supposed excellence as members of the SI. The promised supersession of Leninism was transformed into a regression, the activity and the life of the SI being poisoned not only by the reality of what was in fact the meager egalitarianism of its internal relations, but above all by its magical negation of the organization, which blocked individuals’ self-formation in the collective activity, the only possible way to reduce inequality.

In Gratian’s aphorism on “reality and appearance”, the peacock sees that his right to show off his plumage is conditioned on his “simultaneously turning his glance to the deformity of his feet.” The SI’s imperative of publicizing the role of misery and failure in its first attempts was certainly not a moral imperative, but historical and practical: only in this way could it have, once and for all, undermined the foolishly admiring followerism of so many of its supporters, and to summon them to the discovery of the new problems and most complex preconditions of the revolutionary struggle. The dogmatic propensity to judge history with reference to a norm situated external to it (councilist teleology, for example) very often led, within the SI and among its supporters, to considering the movement of subversion, then quite active, from the exclusive angle of its retreat in relation to the situationist program, without wanting to see that this movement at the same time constituted the critique of that program (of its generality to the point of abstraction); as if the movement of subversion had to do nothing in the future but travel the road which their program had traced, in a word, as if the theory of revolution had nothing to learn from the real revolutionary movement.

Evidently, there is a necessary link between the lucidity concerning particular tasks and the tactical program of the revolutionary activity of a concrete moment, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the capability to organize a truly collective work as a function of the former. This link appears—negatively—in the SI’s double impotence after 1968: its impotence in discerning the terrains and propitious concrete objectives for unification and radicalization, and its impotence in finding the forms of collaboration between individuals exhibiting necessarily very distinct capacities, who were in fact frankly unequal. The fact that the SI was no longer capable from that moment on, through the development and enrichment of its activity, of making situationists, led to the overvaluation of what, among all the qualities which had been necessary to form the SI, was precisely the least transmissible: to become as situationist as Debord could only have meant an absolute impossibility or a grotesque simulation for the SI’s recent arrivals. The predominance of the style and the tastes of an individual—besides condescending to lend them generously to those who surround him, before brutally withdrawing them—must be so much more overwhelming insofar as the historical reasons for collective activity were lost, together with the meaning of the active affirmation of the universal.

Debord undoubtedly sincerely sought to convert the SI into the anti-hierarchical and democratic organization which he had claimed that it was: his interventions from 1966 to 1972 made it clear that he was not in the least interested in perpetuating his preeminence, rather the contrary, and that he had understood at that moment better than anyone what was at stake. The explanation for his failure in this matter must therefore be sought in the character of his own genius, such as it had been formed during his exceptional history, and in the changing relations between that “active element which sets universal actions in motion” and the likewise mobile conditions wherein the former could be exercised. The problem is ultimately a matter of the translation of the means and values proceeding from art and the project of its realization to the terrain of politics. In the same way that the old revolutionary theory of the 19th century, arising from the critique of philosophy, had in part preserved the contemplative point of view of external knowledge (the development of the forces of production replacing the World Spirit), which had directly constituted the basis of its ideologization, modern revolutionary theory has preserved some uncriticized traits of abandoned artistic creation, traits whose retarding effects were very clear after 1968.

“Whoever creates the SI, whoever creates situationists, must also create their defects.” Debord’s activity as the conductor of the SI cannot be understood without explaining how he could have been the best critic of “situationist mythology” as well as its principle artisan at the same time; and he played the latter role right up to the SI’s end, up to the theses of the Veritable Split, where, together with critical observations of great relevance (in particular about the new factor of revolt created by harmful phenomena [nuisances in French--translator's note]), the issue of the SI’s failure is the object of a true theoretical transfiguration which indissolubly glorifies the final product and translated the incomplete task to the terrain of a subversive sequel presented as ineluctable. In an historical individual of such importance, such subjective incoherence must be explained historically, and undoubtedly not from the perspective of psychological pettiness or moralizing; this incoherence must be understood in the context of the movement which had made and unmade, within the SI, the unity of individual passions and universal interests. This perspective, of which only a few elements will be discussed here, will at the same time allow two facts to be considered in their proper context which until now have been concealed, fixing the SI in an admirable past: first, the fact that Debord himself had been able to transform the part played by historical success of the collective operation into an individual wager (that is, he managed, in his own words, “to stop being an authority in the struggle over society except within society itself”); second, the fact that, as a function of this surely original personal “triumph”—as if Marx, after the Commune and the collapse of the First International were to have written a volume of Notes from Beyond the Grave in his own style—Debord soon acquired the tendency to retrospectively underestimate the aspect of failure in the SI, which he had nevertheless felt more acutely than anyone else at the time, and he took great pleasure in sanctifying its necessity by presenting the result of the process as if it had been a conscious motive from the very beginning (see, for example, the 1979 Preface to the Fourth Italian Edition of the Society of the Spectacle: “it was easy to see that this group (…) was then approaching”—this was in 1967—“the culminating point of its historical action”).

The dislocation of the unitary bases of the SI’s activity had its principle cause, as we mentioned above, in the increasing lack of concordance between the situationist program, the desires to which it appealed, and the new forms adopted by a dissatisfaction which was confronted by the authoritarian transformation of everything. We cannot, however, content ourselves with seeing this disarming as the effect of the general law which Hegel coldly enunciated, whereby historical individuals who had attained their goals “fall like empty cartridges”. The goal in question here—to break the artificial social unity proclaimed by the spectacle—was only partially attained: the division of this society’s inhabitants “into two parties, one of which wants it to disappear” did not assume a durable form (and we have even less reason to assert, as Debord still did in 1985, the latter party’s “fracture” of the existing world as a “success”: the opposite is true, it is the disappearance of the party of subversion which has allowed the economy’s owners to proceed so far into disaster). Furthermore, the SI’s theory, although it was still in many ways a tributary of its epoch—then at its end-point—insofar as it had principally been a question for the revolutionaries of transforming the mode of appropriation of the forces of production (see our article, "Ab Ovo"), it had equally contained, and this was its qualitative point, the proper elements for developing into a coherent critique of the whole system of production which from that moment sought a latent rejection of the putrefaction of life. Finally, it cannot be forgotten that, at least the SI was then seeking a collective supersession, and that the problems it faced were still those of all critical activity in the first moments of its extensive diffusion: on the one hand, the necessity of developing its universality by making it concrete, of tactically defining itself by finding new terrains of intervention and, at the same time, the necessity of mastering its first signs of success and the popularization of its theses which will inevitably accompany them, in any case by means other than overvaluing its first agents by emphasizing a quality which the continuators of their project would never be able to attain.

With the long final crisis of the years 1968-1972, a kind of “nostalgia for origins” unfolded as if by logical necessity within and around the SI, that is, nostalgia for the moment when the radical nature of its project was immediately practicable in the very activity of its formulation: a violent separation with respect to the culture of separation, enunciation without concessions of objectives which were then totally scandalous, joyful rupture with the conformism of behavioral roles, everything moved at the same pace, and swiftly. The general style of this first breach was transmitted to the later phases, increasingly ill-adapted and insufficient but never corrected or criticized. To the contrary, the more anachronistic it was, the more it was mystified and appeared as the “amulet” which one had to possess in order to advance invincibly towards future struggles. In reality, however, and already even before 1968, every attempt to restore the unity of critical activity in its primitive situationist form was no more than a retrograde illusion or a “pro-situationist” simulation. It was clearly Debord who had most authentically lived and practiced this lost unity; and it was he who had the most particular knowledge, by having discovered the Northwest Passage which joined modern art’s will to permanent innovation to the program of a conscious creation of life in its entirety, of how to search for and find his own satisfaction in the affirmation of those objectives which count in universal history. Debord was therefore both better-placed than anyone to perpetuate the glorious image of the SI (which, as he confessed, he did for too long) and to perceive how this image was being falsely transformed into public relations.

The situationist program had “saved” conscious creation by transferring it from the old artistic specialization to revolutionary practice, and from the aesthetic theory of individual expression to the critical theory of communication. But this “salvation by transference” had—historically and theoretically—a merely transitional character. The end of this transition was manifested within the SI itself as the conversion of its early methods into grave handicaps, and especially by how the initial anti-aesthetic will gave way to a ridiculous aestheticization of politics. Availing ourselves of notions employed by Walter Benjamin in his essay on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", we can say that this aestheticization is the historical residue of the operation by which Debord recreated around the SI the aura which belonged to the old work of art. And as Benjamin demonstrated, to the quality of the aura are opposed the qualities of reproducibility and perfectibility. It is in any case easy to prove how the “ritual” value of the situationist program (revelation of a total theory, sectarian certainty of belonging to a community of the elect, etc.) was effectively opposed to its “expository value”, that is, to its capacity for publicly expounding practical goals and perfectible propositions through associations polarized around struggles and common discussions.

It would be interesting in this connection (see the article, "Vanguards") to analyze in detail everything which the SI’s mythology reproduced from artistic vanguardism, how the SI had re-activated, for better and for worse, so many values and behaviors derived from modern art, which the latter had elaborated precisely in response to the loss of the aura of works of art; the oscillation between the negation of aesthetics and the aestheticization of negation which had marked the whole cycle since Baudelaire. It will suffice for now to prove that although in the light of the program of the supersession of art (free creation of the situations of life), it had once again been possible to understand and to implacably criticize the totally opposite development of dominant society, once this program’s practical verification had begun in 1968, and when for its part the spectacle began to realize art in its own way, a program with these characteristics not only did not allow for confronting the new problems posed by the extensive development of its critique, but also impeded its being understood by prolonging the influence of illusions inherited from the artistic past, such as the ahistorical positive appraisal of innovation, of personal originality, and even of personal success and of the kind of seduction which it exercised. As a theory of modern revolution, situationist theory, formulated on the narrow basis of agitation within and against culture, and aiming beyond the boundaries of these conditions, could not be adopted as it was—in any but a purely formal manner suited to diligent followers—by the movement which was then being born on much wider bases, in now-changed conditions; and, dialectically, this theory could not truly convert itself into the general expression of the real movement, except by its own development of its universal content and by settling accounts with its earlier form, that first stirring of a total subversive program which guards “the appearance of being the esoteric possession of a few individuals”—and having failed in this task, it took on the responsibility for its recovery and provided its own exoteric version.

The way that Debord, for his part, confronted the outdated situationist form of critical activity, is clarified if we compare two statements, one prior to the crisis of the SI, the other contemporaneous with the SI’s dissolution. In 1966 he wrote in No. 10 of the SI’s journal, concerning the individual freedom which it was advisable to restore to those who would want to compromise a common project with their incoherencies: “that this freedom would be generally impoverished is another problem, without which there would have been no need for a project like the SI at this time”; and in 1971 Debord declared to the last remaining situationists: “as for us, only insofar as we do not need the SI could we form part of it.” This affirmation was directed at those who needed the SI “to personally amount to something”, but it also appeared to indicate positively that time had run out for those who had constantly found themselves at the heart of the operation and who thought that “the I without the We collapses into a prefabricated mass” (Potlatch, No. 1, New Series, July 1959). In the theses of the Veritable Split, the unity of individual passions and universal interests was still formally maintained (when in reality it was a question of an individual response to a collective non-supersession) by means of the ad hoc theoretical hypothesis according to which the SI’s liquidation corresponded exactly with the necessities of a vast social movement which rendered its continued existence useless. (Today, the author of Panegyric speaks instead of the “repugnant seventies”.) Then, to preserve this shattered unity in memory, Debord paradoxically transformed himself, with his autobiographical film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, into the last artist in an epoch without art. The truth of collective activity can no longer be expressed in the common language of that activity, which no longer exists, or in that of a superior collective activity which would judge it, which does not exist either. It is, therefore, the moment of the most irreducibly subjective expression, through which the game with time, which had been identified with the revolutionary possibilities of an epoch, must return to the game of an individual adventure which closes the circle of time to find its ultimate meaning in its origin. (This return would be even more emphasized in 1989: “. . . it is what I did in 1952 that has made me so disliked for so long”.) By confirming the lack of communication with a despicable public, individual expression thereby rediscovers something of modern art, the violent assertion of the loss of all common language which had effectively been its point of departure, but only by retrospectively magnifying the project of the re-conquest of the community of dialog within an historical project. This detachment from all practical perspective is the most striking characteristic of the Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, where the critique which had been conceived in direct relation with the praxis of the revolutionary movement is developed solely on the theoretical plane, without leaving any place, not even the possibility, for the new experiences of practical struggles which are slowly being reborn under various forms; and which, developing independently of the critical theory of the previous epoch can certainly appear to be trivial in the view of those who would continue that theory. Although the special quality which was so highly demanded in the exercise of critical lucidity cannot jeopardize the capability to recognize and calculate the relation of this critique to the totality to actually be transformed (as is proven on the other hand by the belated character of this balance sheet of the years of counterrevolution, published at a moment when new contradictions began to see the light), it would nonetheless be petty to reproach Debord for his conduct, taking into account the quality of its historical results, as it would be inadmissible to not want to recognize the revolutionary necessities which this conduct arrogantly neglects.

It is only in light of these necessities that the history of the SI can be understood and, eventually, written.

(Originally published in 1992 in issue 15 the French journal Encyclopédie des Nuisances. Spanish translation by Maldeojo, published in 2000 in radikales livres.)

Spanish translation available online at:

http://mikuerpo.blogspot.com/2010/08/compendio.html