Tentative Andy
I'm in the Meal Deal
Situationism will never die!
Situationism
- Thread starter Tentative Andy
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Tentative Andy
I'm in the Meal Deal
My local library is sadly lacking in the key texts mentioned here. Going to give the on-line stuff a proper shot over the weekend.
xeropreviouslyminusone (moving up the world)
well you know, we try...!
cheers, wasn't aware of that film - will def. check it out
think it was indeed - thanks mate
OMG I went there as a fledgling riot grrl in 1994! they have a WEB SITE?
Early in Lipstick Traces (1989), his ‘secret history of the 20th century’ in which the Situationists figure centrally, Greil Marcus limns a phantom community in the shadows:
In this sense the SI is not finished.
Then, too, there is the move, sometimes made by Debord and associates, whereby failure is recouped as success, as, for example, in the ‘Thesis on the Paris Commune’, published in 1962: ‘Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there.’ This seems to hold for Debord and company too. Yet even here there is a fatalism that contradicts the Situ language of ‘situation’ and ‘construction’. This fatalism is voiced most vividly in a scene from the movie Mr Arkadin (1955), which Debord would use to conclude his own film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973). Played by Orson Welles, the lordly Arkadin tells his guests at a ball in his castle the parable of the scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river. ‘Why should I risk it?’ the frog replies. ‘You’ll sting me.’ The scorpion responds that all logic would prevent such an outcome, for he too would then perish with his partner. Convinced, the frog agrees to assist the scorpion, but midway across he feels a deadly sting. Arkadin takes over from here: ‘“Logic?” cried the dying frog as he started pulling the scorpion down with him. “Where is the logic in this?” “I know,” said the scorpion, “but I can’t help it, it’s my character.”’ ‘Let’s drink to character!’ Arkadin cries, while on the screen Debord shows us found footage of a doomed cavalry charge. In these letters Debord is sometimes the scorpion and sometimes the frog – and always the cavalry charge.
From Hal Foster in the latest LRB on Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) by Guy Debord. Full article here -
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n05/fost01_.html
Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured – new institutions, new maps, new rulers, new winners and losers – or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?
In this sense the SI is not finished.
Then, too, there is the move, sometimes made by Debord and associates, whereby failure is recouped as success, as, for example, in the ‘Thesis on the Paris Commune’, published in 1962: ‘Theoreticians who examine the history of this movement from a divinely omniscient viewpoint (like that found in classical novels) can easily prove that the Commune was objectively doomed to failure and could not have been successfully consummated. They forget that for those who really lived it, the consummation was already there.’ This seems to hold for Debord and company too. Yet even here there is a fatalism that contradicts the Situ language of ‘situation’ and ‘construction’. This fatalism is voiced most vividly in a scene from the movie Mr Arkadin (1955), which Debord would use to conclude his own film version of The Society of the Spectacle (1973). Played by Orson Welles, the lordly Arkadin tells his guests at a ball in his castle the parable of the scorpion who asks a frog to carry him across a river. ‘Why should I risk it?’ the frog replies. ‘You’ll sting me.’ The scorpion responds that all logic would prevent such an outcome, for he too would then perish with his partner. Convinced, the frog agrees to assist the scorpion, but midway across he feels a deadly sting. Arkadin takes over from here: ‘“Logic?” cried the dying frog as he started pulling the scorpion down with him. “Where is the logic in this?” “I know,” said the scorpion, “but I can’t help it, it’s my character.”’ ‘Let’s drink to character!’ Arkadin cries, while on the screen Debord shows us found footage of a doomed cavalry charge. In these letters Debord is sometimes the scorpion and sometimes the frog – and always the cavalry charge.
From Hal Foster in the latest LRB on Correspondence: The Foundation of the Situationist International (June 1957-60) by Guy Debord. Full article here -
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n05/fost01_.html
subvert47
I don't fight, I run away
this is the most complete collection of texts in one place, no?
yes, except that it's almost unreadable.
their own writing was deliberately abstruse, and debord says somewhere that the most valid reaction is to throw it in the bin
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subvert47
I don't fight, I run away
Agent
dgaf ngaf cgaf
"How does one begin to write about motion, a process, in itself, that is always passing by, slipping away while attempts to capture it are made in words, on a map, or in notes (musical or otherwise)? Spaces of transition, such as hotel lobbies, bus depots, and highways, are difficult to capture, and often impossible to understand without their crucial element of movement. Shopping malls are such a space, and involve multiple levels of movement. As a private space designed to facilitate commercial exchange, there is the necessary fiscal movement of commodities. This in turn requires a second level of motion: the circulation of consumers. The shopping mall cannot be described solely on the basis of its floor plan, location or size; it can only be encountered *in motion*, as a matrix of time and space through which passes a multitude of trajectories. Without the movement of people, the mall itself is dead, not just in the financial sense, but in the spatial sense as well: the mall is incomplete without the crowd. Mirrors reproduce only commodities, floors reflect only muzac, and escalators transport only their own steps. The dependence of the mall on its kinetic component establishes the constitutive role of the crowd." http://proxy.arts.uci.edu/~nideffer/_SPEED_/1.3/product/smith/smith.html
Mr BoShambles
jambiguous
Nucleus -- our choice of metaphors to describe the world around us is instructive in this regard. For the last few centuries the use of architectural metaphors - i.e. foundations, pillars, structures, etc - to depict the nature of things has been very powerful. This is a substantive way of seeing things in the sense that it seeks to isolate discrete and static "things" which can be observed, classified, and ascribed with essential properties.
So e.g. in calling a tree a tree, we represent it as a fixed thing. But actually it is clearly a process - photosynthesis - comprising of continous flux, movement, evolution. Also, when people are asked to draw a tree they regularly draw what they see above ground and forget/ignore the roots-system. Yet the roots are often as substantial, and they are intertwined with the roots of countless other trees/plants to such a degree that defining where the boundaries of the tree actually start/finish is fairly arbitrary.
A river = flows of water
The human body = many interconnected biological processes combining to create a visibly recognisable pattern of relationships (the body) which is similar in all of us, although obviously with massive diversity as to the precise way these appear.
The Nation-State = a pattern of relationships between individual actors, observable structures, abstract rules and regulations. Always coevolving in line with "internal" changes within its society/economy etc; and in line with "external" changes in the international system of states. Although states look sufficiently similar to allow some comparisons between them, actually they are incredibly diverse precisely because they are not "things" but processes.
I like Frijtof Capra's (relationist) take on all of this:
So e.g. in calling a tree a tree, we represent it as a fixed thing. But actually it is clearly a process - photosynthesis - comprising of continous flux, movement, evolution. Also, when people are asked to draw a tree they regularly draw what they see above ground and forget/ignore the roots-system. Yet the roots are often as substantial, and they are intertwined with the roots of countless other trees/plants to such a degree that defining where the boundaries of the tree actually start/finish is fairly arbitrary.
A river = flows of water
The human body = many interconnected biological processes combining to create a visibly recognisable pattern of relationships (the body) which is similar in all of us, although obviously with massive diversity as to the precise way these appear.
The Nation-State = a pattern of relationships between individual actors, observable structures, abstract rules and regulations. Always coevolving in line with "internal" changes within its society/economy etc; and in line with "external" changes in the international system of states. Although states look sufficiently similar to allow some comparisons between them, actually they are incredibly diverse precisely because they are not "things" but processes.
I like Frijtof Capra's (relationist) take on all of this:
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john eden
male pale and stale
It's more readable than a lot of the Pomo toss that followed it.
Interesting about the Chris Grey book. Stewart Home has said for a while that the drugs angle has been really under exposed wrt the sits.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
I was at a festival over the weekend where there was this quite good live group playing sort of jungular dubstep stuff, and one of them was wearing a Situationist Hat. Which is to say, by wearing this Hat he was creating, or at least contributing to, a Situation.
The Hat was a kind of truncated cone of translucent plastic, held in place by a chin strap like a soldier's helmet, with a light inside that was free to spin round as he moved. It was all rather Chris Morris. In any other circumstance it would have been ridiculous but at that moment it was the most appropriate thing he could have possibly have been wearing.
The Hat was a kind of truncated cone of translucent plastic, held in place by a chin strap like a soldier's helmet, with a light inside that was free to spin round as he moved. It was all rather Chris Morris. In any other circumstance it would have been ridiculous but at that moment it was the most appropriate thing he could have possibly have been wearing.
slim jenkins
El Hombre Invisible
The ICA's 'situationist scrapbook' to go with their exhibition in '89 is good...'An endless adventure...'...especially since it has a sandpaper cover...