Situationism

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DannyL

Wild Horses
catalog said:
What's interesting about the panthers is how all the more mainstream French people loved em, Im thinking of genet and godard. Almost like muses. So not quite loved, but there was something attractive about them.
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They were black
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
version said:
Debord's disdain for experts in Comments... really sticks out post-2016.

All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance. Once there were experts in Etruscan art, and competent ones, for Etruscan art was not for sale. But a period which, for example, finds it profitable to fake by chemical means various famous wines, can only sell them if it has created wine experts able to con connoisseurs into admiring their new, more distinctive, flavors.
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You don't need to understand this in post-2016 terms. They just fucking hated everyone who wasn't them, and even in that select enclave they hated everyone else.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
DannyL said:
You don't need to understand this in post-2016 terms. They just fucking hated everyone who wasn't them, and even in that select enclave they hated everyone else.
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Their feuds were brilliant. One of the most entertaining things about them.
 
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DannyL

Wild Horses
Yeah it's like that form of critique and breaking with someone actually becomes praxis. Knabb writes about that somewhere in his piece.
 
V

version

Well-known member
DannyL said:
You don't need to understand this in post-2016 terms. They just fucking hated everyone who wasn't them, and even in that select enclave they hated everyone else.
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I didn't say you did. What I was saying was reading it for the first time post-2016 felt particularly apposite after the vicious back and forth on the role of experts of the last few years.

He's not making that outlandish a claim anyway, and I don't think you can reduce it to just hating everyone - although he clearly had his issues and became something of a paranoid mess. You only need to watch a few talking heads on TV news or follow a few journalists on Twitter to see what he's on about.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
There's a great story about Debord responding to a letter from some revolutionary admirers in the Angry Brigade. He decided to travel to England to meet them, but when he showed up at their flat he found two blokes sitting on a sofa, drinking beer and watching football. Furious, he stormed out swearing at them in French.

Probably apocryphal, but too good to disbelieve.
 
V

version

Well-known member
DannyL said:
(to state the obvs)
That whole fetishisation thing going on, again.
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There's that astonishing sequence in De Palma's Hi, Mom! where a bunch of white liberals agree to take part in this radical black theatre troupe's performance and essentially get assaulted to the point you're unsure whether it's a performance at all then do an interview afterward saying how incredible it was and how they're going to recommend it to all their friends.
 
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version

Well-known member
craner said:
There's a great story about Debord responding to a letter from some revolutionary admirers in the Angry Brigade. He decided to travel to England to meet them, but when he showed up at their flat he found two blokes sitting on a sofa, drinking beer and watching football. Furious, he stormed out swearing at them in French.

Probably apocryphal, but too good to disbelieve.
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I know people are invested in the seriousness of this sort of stuff, but I do think it's beneficial to see that side of it too, like when I joked about the k-punk book being peppered with stuff like 'SPEAKING OF PRETENTIOUS CRAP'. Seems like a necessary puncturing of the mythos.
 
craner

craner

Beast of Burden
Genet's infatuation with the Panthers was the central set piece of Tom Wolfe's 'Radical Chic'.
 
V

version

Well-known member
There's that strange thread in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls about Bert Schneider, the Hollywood producer, becoming obsessed with Huey Newton and helping him flee to Cuba.
 
V

version

Well-known member
craner said:
Their feuds were brilliant. One of the most entertaining things about them.
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One of the recent iterations of this sort of thing is the constant feuding between left wing conspiracy podcasts, all calling each other 'ops' and investigating people's family trees to see who had a grandfather in the OSS or whose father's six degrees of separation from a law firm with links to Jeffrey Epstein.

It's funny, but the entertainment factor quickly wears off.
 
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version

Well-known member
craner said:
There's a great story about Debord responding to a letter from some revolutionary admirers in the Angry Brigade. He decided to travel to England to meet them, but when he showed up at their flat he found two blokes sitting on a sofa, drinking beer and watching football. Furious, he stormed out swearing at them in French.

Probably apocryphal, but too good to disbelieve.
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I can't find it now, but I remember reading something about an event where Deleuze put everyone to sleep drawing botanical diagrams on a blackboard and some huge fight kicked off because of someone taking issue with Foucault.
 
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