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Use of the SI
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the Use of the SI
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> On the Use of the SI
"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles (Debord, Society of the Spectacle)." Any attempt to to continue the revolutionary project presented in the works of the Situationist International (SI) must take into account the ways in which the SI itself has become spectacular, the ways in which its project has been recuperated and reified into a lifeless, ideological "situationism."
To those who know of it - a surprising number given its small size and reclusive nature - the SI seems to represent a moment of particular promise amidst a history of general political decline on the Left. In part, the participation of members of the SI in the French "Strasbourg scandal" of 1966 and the revolutionary events of May 1968 in Paris - and the particular prominence of certain situationist slogans in the subsequent histories of those events - has served to make the SI a focal point for the Left's nostalgic obsession with the revolutionary currents of the 1960s. The May "events" remain the "almost revolution" - the one that got away, so to speak.
It would be foolish to underestimate the power of those revolutionary slogans:
I TAKE MY DESIRES FOR REALITY BECAUSE I BELIEVE IN THE REALITY OF MY DESIRES . . . ABOLISH ALIENATION . . . UNDERNEATH THE PAVING STONES THE BEACH . . . AND IF THE SORBONNE BURNED DOWN? . . . NEVER WORK . . .
This is indeed revolutionary poetry, a fitting accompaniment to the strikes, occupations, battles and demonstrations of May '68. But it is far too easy to conflate the revolution and its signs, or to cling to the signs long after the conflict has played itself out. A nostalgic situationism, committed to tireless circulation of the poetry of past revolutions is merely spectacle, pseudo-resistance.
If we are to avoid constituting a mere situationism, we must move deliberately into an engagement with the ideas of the SI, and with the history of its actions. And it may be that we find it necessary to be less than faithful to the SI itself in order to pursue its revolutionary program. We might recall the words of another "revolutionary, " the Futurist Marinetti, as he eagerly anticipated his own supercession by a future generation. "When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts - we want it to happen!" In that early moment - before Italian Futurism had been recuperated by Mussolini's Fascism - we can see a figure not unlike that of the young Guy-Ernest Debord, perhaps on his way to beard Charlie Chaplin on the steps of the Ritz. Or we see Isidore Isou - Debord's one-time mentor and collaborator - speaking the words that Debord turned to the service of that assault: "truths which are no longer interesting turn into lies."
In short, if are to avoid living in dead time, we must avoid dead words, lies - and we must avoid giving to dead ideas enough of our lives to make zombies of us.
That should not, however, prevent us from attempting to rekindle any sparks that remain, from searching out those sparks in the remains of promising blazes. And, if we follow the SI, fire is our element - just as it was for the Futurists. "So let them come, the gay incediaries with charred fingers! (Marinetti)" Some fires are hard to put out. Debord reminds us: "reification is never complete."
Reification is never complete - it bears repeating. We are in the spectacle - perhaps inescapably of the spectacle - but never completely. Something escapes or exceeds. Something gives the lie to all our ideologies. But that something is hard to grasp. Or it is precisely what "is," but is not graspable with the tools presented to us by the spectacle, by our ideologies. It doesn't make sense. At best, it can only say, "No!"
But sometimes 'No!' is enough to start with. It allows us to break the surface of our placid, multimediated existences. It disorients us, or allows us to disorient ourselves. The spaces of negation and refusal are dangerous spaces. In them we tempt madness, violence, 'evil,' or merely inertia, paralysis. Refusal can slip into denial. Negation into nihilism. But to refuse this danger is all too often to opt finally for assured complicity over possible guilt. The pitfalls of unthinking activism ought to be clear enough to us now. But so should the costs of inactivity and timidity. We cannot afford innocence if we are to oppose the spectacle - to oppose all that stands between individuals and the satisfaction of their desires (and can revolution be anything else?) - from our position in the belly of the beast.
The theory of the SI presents a view of society as essentially alienating - a view which is not so different from Baudrillard's apocalyptic theory of the hyperreal and the obscene. The spectacle is precisely 'more real than reality.' And, like Baudrillard, the SI proposed critical practices that offer as much danger as hope. Detournment (subversion) is the dangerous old game of turning the master's tools against the master. It is a game of escalation, a potlatch which seeks finally to exceed the limits of capital. It seeks to push the quotidian into a space 'beyond' - into a space that we might recognize as 'the sacred.' The object subverted becomes both familiar and unrecognizable. The space it hopes to open is both terrifying and all that one might desire. That is, it is a space of freedom, however short-lived it may be.
Derive (drift) is even 'worse' than that - to borrow once again from Baudrillard's lexicon of extremity. And it bears some resemblance to his notion of seduction. In the drift we give ourselves up to the play of objects. It is no coincidence that Debord and his companions spent much of their time drunk. Sometimes we need help cutting ourselves loose, out of the loop of sense. But there is also a kind of drunken quality to many SI texts. They get carried away, and their words carry us away too, if we allow ourselves to be seduced. But are we not, perhaps, always already captured by objects and ideologies? To what do we cling so tightly when we resist the dangers of drift? Barthes spoke (positively) of drift as a kind of "stupidity." Are we afraid of appearing "stupid"?
And then - worse yet - we are forced to acknowledge that behind the 'dangers' of subversion and drift there lurks an even more fearsome specter - "totality." Debord's "critique of separation" and the "unitary urbanism" of the early SI both seem to invoke some greater whole. (How unpleasant for those of us conditioned by ideological, watered-down postmodernism to flinch at the thought of the "total" - whether it be invoked in the name of Marx, Hegel or the "coming New Age.") Separation is the work of the spectacle, accomplished through the reification of particular power relations into "common sense," and subversion and drift are just two moments of a politics opposed to that reification - two counter-hegemonic practices, if you will. They are attempts to create "situations" in which it is possible to think and act, rather than assent and consume.
The (re)introduction of "totality" into our understanding of the theory of the SI will almost necessarily have at least two effects. First, it will require that we address the issue of the "total" in the context of concepts like drift. The doctrinaire postmodernist reaction against totality seems to have been based on associations between, on the one hand, "totalizing" theories and the tyranny of a certain kind of "rationality" and, on the other, a sort of uneasy slide between the "total" and the "totalitarian." Both sorts of rejections involve a rejection of certain relationships based in control, and on the limits of a certain kind of freedom. But what if the doctrinaire postmodernist has taken the claims of this sort of "totality" too seriously, to the point of denying the possibility of any other, more "playful" sort? What if it is through drift - or through stupidity, rather than rationality - that we approach the total? Surely, this is a dangerous game to enter, but so is the retreat to the "local."
The second effect of this (re)introduction will be to require us to look closely once again at the actual practices of the SI, particularly the tendency of the Debord faction to consistently exclude those with whom he could not come to complete accord. If we follow Debord's analysis, must we also deny the value of Vaneigem's work? Must we expel the "Nashists" from our analysis - as they have been so neatly expunged from nearly all situationist history, except where they appear as a sort of abject other - the inauthentic situationism. Stewart Home has argued that it was Debord and the Paris fraction who drifted from the original project of the SI - and while his argument is certainly partisan, it is just as certainly no more so than Debord's. We are obliged to examine closely the history of the SI, and to ferret out that which has been suppressed (while still unrealized) if we are to make use of the situationist example.
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copyleft 1994 shawn p. wilbur
spread the meme, don't sell it
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